He Got Probation and Then Killed 18 People in 14 Months
90 days. Less than a single Alabama summer. That’s how long Damien McDaniels walked free after a Birmingham judge signed off on his probation. A 15-year sentence that on paper became a signature and an open door. Then the dying started. 18 people gone. More than 30 others wounded. 14 months. By the time it was over, no one in Alabama’s recorded history stood accused of taking more lives than this one young man.
The Jefferson County District Attorney’s Office is prosecuting eight separate cases against McDaniels totaling 14 homicides in the span of 14 months. McDaniel is accused of killing 18 people around Jefferson County. McDaniel faces capital murder charges in connection to 18 homicides in Birmingham, including an unborn child.
This isn’t a story about a monster from some horror film. The young man is real. The victims are real with names most of the country never learned. And the city of Birmingham is still searching for two answers it cannot find. How did this go on for 14 months before anyone stopped him? And why do investigators believe that some of these deaths were never random at all? That someone somewhere was paying. Stay with me.
This one only gets harder to look away from. Birmingham is a city that knows how to keep going. People clock in, raise their kids, fill the pews on Sunday, throw birthday parties in rented halls, and bury their dead in the same good suits. It has deep roots and deeper wounds.
And it had learned, long before any of this, how to carry both at once. That was the Birmingham its people lived in. There was another one taking shape at the same time. It lived on a whiteboard in a homicide unit. In case files growing thicker, one folder at a time in a pattern that didn’t have a name yet. Two cities, the same streets.
Most people only ever saw the first. The man at the center of the second had already walked through a courtroom door once and come out the other side. In 2019 at 17, Damien McDaniel was charged with firing into an occupied car, two counts of attempted murder. He pleaded guilty years later and the number the judge read out sounded like justice, 15 years.
But most of it was suspended and what was left was a split sentence, the kind you’re supposed to serve day for day. This is where the system came apart so quietly almost no one noticed. McDaniel had already spent more than two years behind bars waiting on his case and every one of those days counted against the time he had left.
It canceled what remained almost the moment it was spoken. He didn’t outsmart anyone. The arithmetic set him loose. To the people who knew him, he was no one’s nightmare. His family stood beside him certain. But inside that second Birmingham, the one being built in files, he was already something colder, named in federal records as an enforcer, the muscle a local operation keeps close for when a problem needs to disappear.
For now, it was just a line in a report. Nobody had tied that word to a single body yet. That was about to change. Jordan Melton was 29 years old and his whole job was running toward the thing the rest of us run from. The morning of July 12th, 2023, he and Sergeant Jamal Jones were getting ready for their shift at Fire Station 9 in the Norwood community.
The bay doors were up. The station was open to anyone who needed help. That was the point of it. And someone walked in who didn’t come for help at all. And it was over. Two firefighters were down inside the one building in the whole city built to send rescue out the door. A third man there ran for help that this time was for them.
Jones lived, though the man he’d been was changed for good. Melton held on for 5 days, then he was gone. He’d been with the department only a few months. The first life taken in all of this belonged to a man trained to save them. Two weeks ago to the day, firefighter Jordan Melton and Jamal Jones were shot while working at station number nine in Norwood.
And 5 days later, Melton would die from his injuries. Funeral services this afternoon in Birmingham. And it happened less than 90 days after that signature set Damien McDaniel loose. After that, the pattern didn’t pause to let the city breathe. It moved into quieter places, the kind without sirens.
It came up behind Reginald Bryant, 52, in the back of a house on Closcha Lane over in Pratt. Word was he was a familiar face around the city’s nightclubs. Police didn’t call it random, they called it targeted and moved on with no one in cuffs. Birmingham police are now asking for your help to solve a murder. They say 52-year-old Reginald Bryant was shot and killed Monday afternoon.
Police say somebody was targeting him when they fired multiple shots. Aubrey Chappelle on the case live at 5 and he was very well known in the community, Bria. Then it found Miya Nixon, 21, in her own driveway on Crest Green, those last few feet of pavement that are supposed to be the safest steps you take all day, the stretch between the world and your own front door.
She never made it inside. Also new at 9:05, Birmingham police asking for your help to find whoever shot and killed this young woman, Miya Nixon, back in January. Investigators say her family is hurting and pushing for justice in her case. Then in Valentine’s Day, Angelia Webster and Christian Norris were both 20 and they went out for a movie like any young couple in love.
Their families reported them missing the next morning. Two days later, the white Ford Taurus they’d driven off in turned up in the Wylam neighborhood and they were still inside it. Angelia was pregnant. They’d already chosen the name Seven because her mother, Demetria Sistrunk, said it means completion in the Bible and this baby was going to complete her.
There was a gender reveal planned for April Disney themed None of it came. Three lives ended in one car and one of them was a boy named Seven who never got the chance to take a single breath. And tonight BPD telling us they have Taurus McDaniel with the murder of this couple, Christina Christine Norris and Angelia Webster Christian Norris rather and Angelia Webster and their unborn child.
They were found dead in a car in Wylam in February of last year after they were last seen on Valentine’s Day going on a date. And then there was Anthony Lamar Love Jr., 44 years old out of Alabaster, 20 years driving for UPS. On April 9th, 2024, his shift was finished and he was walking to his vehicle at the facility on England to Glade when a man approached him in the lot.
Here is where the story cracks open for the first time, where it stops looking like chaos because Anthony Love wasn’t standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. A second man, Charles Darius Nance, 41 out of Pinson, would later be charged right alongside McDaniel for handing over exactly who Love was and where to find him. He wasn’t unlucky.
He was chosen. You hold that word for a moment. And then the killing got loud. Junior Anthony Lamar Love Jr. excuse me was shot in the parking lot as he was walking to his car. Now, police have not arrested anyone at this point, but investigators say it was a targeted attack. They do not believe that this was a workplace shooting.
July 13th, 2024 on 27th Street North, somebody was throwing a birthday party. The kind of night people show up to because they love somebody. A car rolls past in the dark, and the shots come from the street into the crowd. Four people did not walk back out. Lorandus Anderson, 24. Stevie McGee, 39.
Markeisha Giddings, 42. And Angela Witherspoon, 56. Old enough to have earned a quiet night and still alive enough to want to dance. 10 more were wounded. A man named Hatterious Woods was later charged in it, too. 14 people shot, four of them killed Saturday night at Vision Event Center in North Birmingham. There are too many families who have been devastated and destroyed because of gun violence in our city.
And everyone in this room, to be frank, is just sick and tired of But not every one of these fit a crowd. That August, 61-year-old Charli Herbert Moore was taken inside his own home. And the worst part is the shooter wasn’t even there for him. They come for another face. In September, a 35-year-old mother named Deontrenice Tina Brown was lost inside the 604 Bar and Lounge on 9th Street North.
And police would say that shooting was aimed, too, just not at her. Coroner’s office identifying the woman as 35-year-old Deontrenice Brown. Police say that the shooting happened around 8:15 at the 604 Bar and Lounge on 9th Street North. When officers entered the bar, they found her shot. She was taken to UAB Hospital, but later died.
No one else inside the bar was hurt. Police do not believe the shooting was random. They do believe that Brown was the intended target. Two people in the wrong end of the world paying for a name that wasn’t theirs. And then the worst night of all, September 21st in Five Points South, the part of town people go to precisely because it feels alive.
It’s just past 11:00. A vehicle rolls along the row of lounges and the night cracks wide open. Four are gone before it ends. Anitra Hallman, 21. Roderick Lynn Patterson, Jr., 26. Taj Booker and Carlos McCain, both 27. Not one of them had reached 30. 17 more were hit. To this day it stands as the deadliest mass shooting in Birmingham’s history.
And even here, in all that noise, police believed the same cold thing was true. The night had a target and that target was lying among the dead. Total 21 people were shot, four killed, 17 others hurt. Today we learned that 12 of the victims who were hurt are now out of the hospital, while five others are still being treated.
Local and federal officials say they’ve received more than 50 tips in the last 24 hours. The very next night, Jamarcus McIntyre, 32, was gone, too. By now, there were too many names. But inside those case files, someone was beginning to notice something worse than the number. Too many of these had a target.
Someone, over and over, had been choosing. Go back to the beginning and watch it again and a different shape rises out of it. Investigators did exactly that. When they laid the cases side by side, the thing that chilled them wasn’t how many there were. It was how many came with a name attached before the trigger was ever touched. In court records, prosecutors lay it out plainly.
In at least three of these deaths, Anthony Love, Jr., Charlie Moore, Jamarcus McIntyre, someone fed McDaniel the target ahead of time. Who the person was, where to find them, when they’d be there, that someone in Love’s case has a name now. Charles Nance, charged right beside McDaniel under a single brutal heading, murder for hire.
Sit with what that means because it rewrites everything you just heard. That driver in the parking lot wasn’t a tragedy of chance. That man in his own living room wasn’t a mix-up of the moment. Somewhere a decision got made about each of them and money or favor moved and a problem became an assignment. This is why those federal records called McDaniel an enforcer.
He was by that account the hand a local operation reached for when a name needed to come off the board and the courts had just handed that hand back to the street on a sentence that erased itself. That’s the part Birmingham still can’t fully square. Not the chaos, the order hidden inside the chaos. Some of this looked like a city coming apart at random.
Some of it was a list. And the people who could have said so, the ones who saw, who knew which deaths had a buyer behind them, mostly didn’t. We’ll get to why. In a city where talking can get you added to a list of your own, silence isn’t cowardice. It’s how you stay breathing. Stay with me because what comes next is how they finally pulled the thread loose and how long it should never have taken.
Pulling a case like this together isn’t the work of a week or a month. It’s detectives buried in phone records and surveillance footage frame by frame in the slow grind of laying one shooting beside another and asking what they share. Some of it linked clean, the same weapon turning up across scenes that had nothing else in common, the kind of match that doesn’t lie.
Other deaths held onto their secrets longer and the witnesses were their own wall. People had seen things, plenty of them, but in a city where saying a a out loud can put your own name in play. Most of what they knew stayed locked behind their teeth. Call it what it is. Not cowardice, survival. Detectives had to build the case around that silence, not through it.
Piece by piece they built enough enough to make the arrest late in 2024 enough to charge him across case after case enough eventually to walk into a courtroom and ask the state to take his life in return. By then the man at the center had been moved. First to Kilby, later to Limestone, held without bond, kept apart for his own safety as much as anyone else’s.
Word was the threats had reached his family on the outside, too. With 40 victims, dozens of family members show up to see him brought to justice. The actual event was horrific and we feel for the the victims and their family. We understand uh that they uh they want someone prosecuted. The thing about a list is that everybody fears being on it.
When McDaniel finally faced the court, he didn’t look like the figure the headlines had built. He called himself a man of God. He said he wasn’t the thing the media had made him. His attorney, John Robbins, has held the line on every count. His client maintains his innocence and the defense intends to fight each charge one jury at a time.
The state is just as set. Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr is seeking the ultimate penalty across multiple capital counts. And he’s been honest with the families about what that road actually is. Charging a man, he said, is one thing. Convicting him is another. It is not a sprint. It’s a marathon. And it runs on patience and prayer.
So, here’s where it all sits right now, today. The first trial, the birthday party on 27th Street, the four lives taken there, has been set for January 25th, 2027. Evidence has been ruled admissible. The machinery is moving, but not one verdict has been reached. Not one. 18 names and every family attached to them is still in those hard wooden chairs, still waiting for justice that hasn’t come.
McDaniel is accused of killing 18 people around Jefferson County. Gutster says in a situation like this, where the defendant is facing allegations of multiple victims with multiple witnesses and the death penalty is on the table, the defense team will want to make sure they’re getting fair treatment in court.
So, sit with the question this whole thing keeps circling back to not who, we know who stands accused. The question that should keep our city up at night is how how 14 months were allowed to pass with bodies stacking up in driveways and fire stations and parking lots before anyone closed the door that should never have come open in the first place. Start with that door.
A young man already convicted of firing into an occupied car walked out the far side of his sentence on a technicality of arithmetic, time already served quietly, canceling the time he had left. No one broke a rule. That’s the part that should frighten you most. The system worked exactly as written and what it produced was a man it had labeled an enforcer, set back down on the same streets he’d come from, free to begin again.
After that came the gaps, months between killings where the connections sat unmade, where name in one file and a name in another waited for someone to set them on the same desk. Witnesses who couldn’t speak, a pattern that took far too long to be seen as a pattern. Every one of those gaps was a window. People died inside them.
And here is the second question. The one planted at the very start, why did almost none of this reach you? 18 lives. The deadliest accused killer in the history of a state. A case with murder for hire running through it like a wire. By every measure, this should have parked satellite trucks outside the Jefferson County jail for weeks.
It mostly stayed local. The uncomfortable, undeniable reason is that the victims and the accused were nearly all black in a corner of America the rest of the country has long since trained itself to look past. The weight of national outrage a tragedy receives has never tracked cleanly with its size. It has always bent, at least a little, around who was lost and where they happened to live.
These families earned that outrage. Most of the country never even learned the names to feel it. None of which excuses a single thing that was done. But it does explain the ground it grew in. The poverty packed tight into certain zip codes. The schools left then. The mental health help that was stretched to nothing or was never there at all.
McDaniel came up inside all of that. So did many of the people he’s accused of taking. That isn’t a defense. It’s a mirror. And a city that wants to make sure there’s never another name like his has to be willing to look into it honestly. So look, not at the man, at the people the system was too slow to protect.
Jordan Melton ran toward fires for a living. Meiko Nixon was steps from her own front door. Anthony Love Jr. had finished his route. Angelia Webster and Christian Norris went out for a movie on Valentine’s night. And somewhere between the car and the dark, a boy named Seven lost the only chance he’d ever get to be born.
Reginald Bryant, Charlie Moore, De’Andra Brown, Lorandus Anderson, Stevie McGee, Markisha Geddings, Angela Witherspoon, Anitra Holloman, Roderick Patterson, Taj Booker, Carlos McCain, JaMarcus McIntyre. 18 lives, each one a whole world that had somewhere to be and people who needed them home. They are gone.
And the hardest truth in all of it isn’t the number, it’s that so few of them were random. Some were a wrong inch of the world. Some were a name on someone’s list. And the door that let it all begin was one the law itself left standing open. Birmingham is still here, still hurting. The families will keep showing up in those hard wooden chairs, dressed with care, holding each others hands, waiting to see whether a system that failed them once can finally get it right.
The trials are coming. The names are already written.