On January 9, 2008, Lonzel “Bobo” Davis Jr., a 57-year-old male from Birmingham, Alabama, was found shot to death inside his home in the Gate City area, in the kitchen of the house on Antwerp Avenue. In the days that followed, as his family and church community moved from shock to grief, the public record of his life showed a man known in Birmingham not just by his name, but by his calling: he served as pastor of the New Hope Primitive Baptist Church of Robinwood, and was being remembered
in death notices alongside the familiar details of visitation, funeral arrangements, and burial.
Investigators focused early on the account given by his step-daughter, Knikita Aydelotte, who reported finding him. Police ultimately charged her with capital murder, with reporting at the time pointing to evidence they said they located in her car. The case did not end in an unresolved file or a lingering mystery on a bulletin board; it moved into court, where the charge followed her into a trial setting.
In December 2008, in the midst of that trial, Aydelotte changed her plea to guilty. The outcome was a life sentence with the possibility of parole—an ending that closed the criminal case even as it left the human story raw for those who had loved him: a pastor killed in his own kitchen, and a family relationship at the center of the prosecution’s narrative of how and why it happened.
Years later, state parole records continued to reflect the sentence’s long shadow, listing Aydelotte among people considered for parole and showing at least one parole denial in 2021. For the people who gathered to mourn Davis in January 2008, those later administrative entries could never capture what the earliest reports already implied: that the final moments of his life unfolded at home, and that the arrest and conviction that followed were bound tightly to his own household.
