Dearrius Portis, 29, a Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, died on August 9, 2016, after spending nearly two weeks in the hospital with a gunshot wound suffered in an Ensley shooting. The violence that set everything in motion happened on July 28, 2016, in the 4000 block of Avenue I, near a Marathon gas station. When officers arrived, they found him on the sidewalk, badly wounded, and he was rushed to UAB Hospital for treatment.
For days, the case sat in that uneasy space between life and death, with Portis fighting his injuries before he was finally pronounced dead.
His death was not immediately classified the way it would later be remembered. Authorities said the Birmingham Coroner’s Office officially ruled the death a homicide on August 22, turning what had first been an aggravated shooting into a homicide investigation. That ruling gave the case a heavier finality, confirming that the shooting in Ensley had become yet another killing for Birmingham detectives to untangle. The known public accounts place the shooting in broad daylight and paint a stark scene: a man struck down outdoors, left critically hurt, and then lost days later despite emergency care.
There was also a layer of history hanging over Portis’ name before he was killed. Public reporting at the time noted that he had previously been charged in the 2012 fatal shooting of a 19-year-old outside Mike’s Crossroads on Third Avenue North, but that case had unraveled earlier in 2016 when a Jefferson County grand jury declined to indict him. In the months before his own death, he had also been publicly linked to other unrelated arrests. That backdrop gave his killing an added sense of complication, because it meant investigators were dealing not just with a homicide, but with the death of a man whose name had already appeared in serious criminal proceedings.
As for the case itself, public reporting located online does not appear to identify any person arrested for Portis’ killing, nor does it name a confirmed suspect in the homicide. The available accounts describe the case as one investigated by Birmingham police after the coroner’s ruling, but they do not show a public breakthrough in the form of charges, a trial, or a conviction. What remains is the outline of a grim summer shooting in Ensley that ended with Portis dying in the hospital, and a case that, at least from the publicly available reporting, never produced a named killer or a clear public resolution.
