Isiah Ford, an 18-year-old male from Birmingham, was killed on July 5, 2008, in the Five Points West area after gunfire tore into the car he was driving through the South Park Apartments area near South Park Terrace. Early reports said West Precinct officers were nearby when they heard shots and saw a white car speed away before it left the road and stopped on the grass. Ford, who had been behind the wheel, was found with a gunshot wound and taken to UAB Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
Two other males, ages 17 and 20, were in the vehicle with him, but neither was reported injured. His obituary, published days later, confirmed his death date and Birmingham home, and named his parents and brothers among the family left behind.
In the first shock of the killing, there were no arrests and no charges, and the case looked like one more sudden burst of violence on a summer evening in west Birmingham. The details that surfaced made it especially haunting: officers were close enough to hear the shots, close enough to give chase, yet not close enough to stop what had already happened inside that car. For a time, the public record showed only the bare outline of the case, with police identifying Ford and noting that the two passengers had survived.
Later reporting tied the case to an arrest. Bhamwiki’s 2008 homicide listing states that Ricky Deonte Ward, who was 16 at the time of the shooting, was arrested in August 2008 and charged with capital murder and attempted murder in connection with Ford’s killing. In the material I found online, that is the clearest suspect information connected to the case. I did not find a reliable online source, in the results available here, that documented the final outcome of those charges through trial, conviction, or acquittal, so the public online trail appears to grow thinner after the arrest than it does in many other Birmingham homicide cases from that year.
