Sherman Newton Willis, 67, a White/Caucasian man from Jasper, Alabama, died on January 27, 2014, in a killing that online memorial and obituary sources remember as gun violence. The surviving public record on the open web is fragmentary, but it is clear that his death struck Jasper as a violent loss rather than a natural passing. His obituary was published through Collins-Burke Funeral Home, where family and friends were invited to share condolences and remember him, and his name was also
entered into the National Gun Violence Memorial as someone lost in Jasper on that winter day.
What survives online gives the case a quiet, unfinished feel. The memorial entry ties his death to gun violence in Jasper and points to contemporaneous news coverage, including an AL.com report whose headline stated that a Dora man was arrested in the Monday shooting death of a 67-year-old Jasper man. That means there was at least one reported arrest connected to Willis’s death. However, in the sources I could verify directly online, the arrest coverage is not fully preserved in accessible form, so the suspect’s identity, the exact charges filed, and any later trial or conviction details are not reliably recoverable from the available open-web material I reviewed.
So the story that remains online is stark and spare: Sherman Newton Willis died violently in Jasper on January 27, 2014; his loss was memorialized publicly; and news coverage at the time indicated that authorities had made an arrest involving a man from Dora. Beyond that, the trail grows thin. The obituary and memorial pages keep his name alive, but the more complete law-enforcement and court narrative that would explain who was responsible and what finally happened in court is not clearly available in the accessible sources reviewed here.
