Times Staff Report
Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin said Monday that he spoke with victims of a massing shooting and their families, including one person who was celebrating a birthday and was waiting outside a club when gunfire rang out.
“His mom mentioned to me that they usually go out of town for his birthday, but he decided to celebrate his birthday here,” Woodfin said.
A mother of one of the victims asked for counseling resources, saying the incident has had a tremendous emotional impact on her daughter, the mayor said.
“This type of incident, this mass shooting, has a heavy toll on community as a whole … nothing more harmful than the emotional and physical pain of these actual victims,” he said, adding, “If there ever was a time for us to come together as a community, this is the moment.”
Authorities in Birmingham said “multiple suspects” opened fire in Birmingham’s busy entertainment district over the weekend, killing four people, injuring 17 and leaving city residents shaken. Officials are offering up to $100,000 in reward money for information.
Around 11 p.m. Saturday, the gunmen “fired upon a large group of people” outside in the Five Points South district, a bustling area of shops, bars and restaurants a few blocks from the University of Alabama at Birmingham campus, according to the Birmingham Police Department.
Police said the shooters were targeting at least one person in what may have been a murder-for-hire attempt and that several of the victims were innocent bystanders.
Detectives were still working Monday to identify the gunmen, but Police Chief Scott Thurmond said the person targeted is believed to be among those killed. They were identified as Anitra Holloman, 21; Tahj Booker, 27; Carlos McCain, 27; and Roderick Lynn Patterson Jr., 26.
Four of the people wounded had life-threatening injuries, police spokesperson Truman Fitzgerald said in an email Monday morning. At a news conference, Thurmond said five victims remain in the hospital and 12 have been discharged.
100-Plus Bullets
Thurmond said investigators are combing through a “significant number” of tips they have received through Crime Stoppers, a tip line where people can provide information to detectives anonymously.
“Some of the individuals that were killed have extensive criminal histories and because of that there’s oftentimes motivation from others,” Thurmond said Monday in explaining the murder-for-hire theory. “And there’s people who are willing to pay to have them killed and so that’s part of it.”
Investigators are also working with federal partners to “connect the dots” between separate pieces of evidence, including information gathered from witness interviews and surveillance video of the attack.
Thurmond said several shooters opened fire from a vehicle, then came out of it and continued firing more than 100 bullets.
Shooters Suspected of Using Modified Weapons
Both the police department and Woodfin said the shooters are believed to have modified their weapons using devices that can convert semiautomatic guns into automatic weapons.
“This is not the first occasion, unfortunately, in 2024 where we’ve seen the style of weapons, the number of bullets on the scene … for automatic weapons being used in our streets,” Woodfin said at a Sunday news conference.
Alabama state lawmakers have pushed to codify a federal ban of the devices under state law, but that effort fell short in the last state legislative session.
Federal agencies assist in investigation
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are assisting local police in the investigation.
The FBI on Monday announced a reward of $50,000 for information leading to an arrest and conviction. Crime Stoppers also offered $50,000 for information leading to the solving of the case – the largest amount ever offered by Crime Stoppers in the state, according to J. Frank Barefield Jr., chairman of Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama.
“I want to make myself clear on what the priority is: It is to hunt down, capture, arrest and convict the people who are responsible for this mass shooting,” Woodfin said, calling the shooters “cowards” for firing at a crowd gathered outside a club.
The incident is the latest shooting to rock Birmingham this year. In July, a shooting at a nightclub left four people dead. The same month, three people, including a 5-year-old child, were killed in a shooting. The 114 homicides this year in Birmingham, with a population of approximately 200,000, is about half the 422 recorded in Chicago, which has more than 10 times the number of residents, the Associated Press reported.
Woodfin urged lawmakers to ban assault weapons, saying, “Elected officials locally, statewide and nationally have a duty to solve this American crisis.”
Contributing: John Bacon and Jorge L. Ortiz, USA TODAY; Marty Roney and Victor Hagan, Montgomery Advertiser
