On a Halloween night in 1982, the life of Robert D. Patterson, a 51-year-old White male, was tragically cut short in Birmingham, Alabama. A 20-year veteran of the Birmingham Police Department, Patterson was working a secondary, plainclothes security job at a nightclub on Morris Avenue. The evening took a dark turn when a fight broke out between two women inside the establishment.
Patterson intervened in the altercation and successfully disarmed one of the women who had brandished a knife. As he was escorting the woman out of the nightclub, an on-duty police officer arrived at the scene. Unaware of the preceding events and seeing a man in plain clothes with a woman and a knife, the officer tragically mistook Patterson for an assailant holding the woman at knifepoint.
In a fateful moment of misunderstanding, the on-duty officer grabbed Patterson's arm and discharged his weapon. The single gunshot wounded Patterson, who was then rushed into surgery. Despite the efforts of medical personnel, he succumbed to his injuries a short time later. The death of Officer Robert D. Patterson was a devastating accident, a case of mistaken identity that ended in the loss of a seasoned officer's life at the hands of a fellow officer. There were no suspects or arrests in the conventional sense, as the incident was deemed a tragic, inadvertent shooting.
