Corry DeWayne Fowler, a 43-year-old Black/African American man, spent the late afternoon of Sunday, June 28, 2015, at an apartment complex in Center Point on the edge of Birmingham, Alabama. By about 5:15 p.m., the calm on Charter East Circle was shattered by gunfire in the 1500 block, and Fowler was struck. In the frantic minutes that followed, he wasn’t taken away in an ambulance; instead, someone close to him rushed him to a nearby convenience store on Old Springville Road, where
paramedics finally met him and transported him on to the hospital.
Doctors fought to save him, but the wounds were too severe. News reports later said Fowler died at UAB, and investigators shifted the case from a shooting investigation to a homicide. The circumstances only deepened the unease around the Pineview Point Apartments, because this was the second shooting in the same building in roughly 48 hours—another victim had been shot days earlier and had also been driven to a convenience store before being taken for medical care, surviving with life-threatening injuries. Deputies described the situation as unusual, and in the earliest public updates they did not say what sparked the gunfire that hit Fowler.
As neighbors absorbed what had happened, a story began to circulate among witnesses: Fowler, described as a father of five, had stepped into a dispute and was shot while trying to stop an argument. Residents worried about the violence spilling into everyday life—children played in the area, and tenants pleaded for better security after two shootings in one weekend. Fowler’s girlfriend, Keshia Pettway, spoke about the shock rippling through the community, saying everyone was hurting—kids, family, friends—and that it was “unexplainable” because it was unexpected. Authorities asked anyone with information to contact the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office, but public reporting at the time offered no named suspect and no announced arrest connected to Fowler’s killing.
In the days that followed, grief moved from the crime-scene rumors and unanswered questions into the rituals of farewell. Fowler’s obituary listed a large family—children, stepchildren, parents, siblings, grandparents, and grandchildren—and laid out arrangements that gathered loved ones to remember him: a funeral service set for Saturday, July 11, 2015, at St. James Baptist Church in the Druid Hill area of Birmingham, with burial at Carver Memorial Cemetery. The public notices focused on the family he left behind and the services honoring his life, while the investigative details—who fired the shot, why it happened, and whether anyone would be held responsible—remained absent from the contemporaneous reports.
