Do you know who shot Antwon? In the early evening of February 2, 2017, the life of 37-year-old Antwon Hawkins, a Black male, was tragically cut short in Birmingham, Alabama. Hawkins, who was visiting from his home in California, was found on a sidewalk in the Tom Brown Village public housing community. Residents in the 4100 block of Fifth Court North had reported hearing gunfire, and when Birmingham police officers arrived on the scene, they discovered Hawkins suffering from multiple gunshot wounds.
He was pronounced dead at 8:43 p.m.
The circumstances surrounding Hawkins's visit to Birmingham added another layer of tragedy to his untimely death. He had returned to his hometown not for a joyous reunion, but to attend the funeral of another family member. His death compounded the grief for a family already in mourning. The pain for the Hawkins family was unimaginably amplified by the fact that just four months earlier, on October 9, 2016, Antwon's first cousin, 23-year-old Rakim Hawkins, had also been shot and killed in Birmingham's Kingston neighborhood.
Despite the Birmingham Police Department launching a homicide investigation into Antwon Hawkins's death, no suspects have ever been publicly identified, and no arrests have been made in the case. The shooting remains an unsolved crime, leaving a family to grapple with the profound and unanswered loss of two of its members in a short span of time. The back-to-back violent deaths of the cousins left their loved ones and the community searching for justice and closure that has yet to come.
