On the evening of June 19, 2015, police were summoned to a home on Greenview Drive in Tuscaloosa after a family member arrived and found two people dead inside. The scene was quiet in the way tragedies often are—no warning for the person who opened the door, only the sudden realization that something irreversible had happened, and the urgent call for help that followed.
Rosa Mae Busby, 60, a woman from Tuscaloosa, was one of the two who died there.
Investigators determined both victims had suffered gunshot wounds, and as the first pieces of the story came into focus, authorities described the pair as not related but involved in a relationship and living together in that residence. What began as an investigation into “unnatural” deaths quickly narrowed into a grim, intimate narrative of violence inside a shared home.
As detectives worked through the early hours of the case, they came to believe the shooting was a murder-suicide: that Roger Creer shot Busby and then turned the gun on himself. With the suspected shooter also dead at the scene, there was no arrest to be made, no manhunt that spilled into the streets, and no courtroom path to follow—only the hard work of confirming what happened and notifying loved ones that the worst kind of news was now theirs to carry.
In the days that followed, the public record of Busby’s death shifted from flashing emergency lights to funeral arrangements and final remembrances, noting that she died at her residence on June 19, 2015. The case, reported at the time as still under investigation, did not unfold into a series of arrests or later prosecutions tied to her death; instead, it remained marked by the conclusion investigators reached at the scene—an apparent murder-suicide that ended two lives in a single, devastating moment.
