Rodarius Williams, a 20-year-old Black man, was killed by gunfire on July 5, 2014, in Ward, Alabama, a small community where summer nights often end with people spilling out of gatherings and into the dark. That night, an altercation erupted after a party held at a recreation building, and the argument turned into shooting. Williams was struck and died, and another young man, Sherman Gillum Jr., was also killed in the same burst of violence, leaving two families grieving the same date for the same sudden reason.
Investigators focused on two suspects, Rickey James Woodard and Jacoby Germayel Culbert, and both men were charged with capital murder in connection with the killings, a charge that carried the possibility of the death penalty or life in prison under Alabama law. As the case moved through court, the story of what happened in Ward stayed tied to that party and the chaotic moments that followed it—an ordinary rural get-together collapsing into a deadly confrontation that didn’t end when the shots stopped, because the legal aftermath stretched on for years.
The case took another turn in December 2014, when Culbert was among three inmates who escaped from the Choctaw County Jail during a late-night breakout that triggered a multi-county manhunt and drew in outside agencies searching for fugitives. Authorities ultimately captured the escapees and returned them to custody, and Culbert faced additional legal jeopardy tied to the escape on top of the homicide case already hanging over him.
By the time a jury trial loomed in 2017, the path shifted again: Culbert accepted a last-minute plea agreement that sent him to prison for 15 years on charges related to the 2014 killings, avoiding a capital-murder trial that week. The plea closed one chapter of the prosecution, even as the deaths of Williams and Gillum remained rooted in the same stark scene—an argument after a Ward party that ended in gunshot wounds and two lives cut short.
