Mass shooting arrest, another Methodist lawsuit: Down in Alabama
A key arrest
Birmingham Police have charged a 22-year-old in the mass shooting that killed four outside a Five Points South bar on Sept. 21, reports AL.com’s Carol Robinson.
They also charged Damien Laron McDaniel III in two other homicides that all happened in a 72-hour span. He’s accused of killing a woman, who police say was an innocent bystander in a bar, just over a day before the Five Points South killings, and then shooting a man to death less than a day after the mass shooting.
Add to all that 17 counts of first-degree assault for people injured at Five Points South and three counts of attempted murder for people wounded at one of the other shootings.
Police say this investigation is still going and it touches on other crimes. They said the three shootings McDaniel is charged in are related but haven’t said more.
Here’s an example of how this could be interwoven with more Birmingham crime:
I mentioned above that one of McDaniel’s charges come from the shooting death of a man. There have been three other people charged with capital murder in that killing. One of the accused, Larry Denzel Rollins Jr., was acquitted of murder in another killing earlier this year. That acquittal followed the shooting death of a witness in the case. And that witness was Jordan Melton, a firefighter who was shot and killed last year at Birmingham Fire and Rescue Service Station 9.
Pre-election adjustments
More instruction has come down from a federal judge regarding Alabama’s program to purge people from voter rolls. U.S. District Judge Anna M. Manasco already told Secretary of State Wes Allen to stop the voter purge until after the Nov. 5 election.
The program’s purpose is to rid the rolls of those who are registered illegally. After a lawsuit was filed, the program was found to have moved many legal voters to inactive status as well, however.
AL.com’s Joseph D. Bryant reports that the judge has given the state three days to restore active status to those people.
Allen also has to notify the Alabama attorney general’s office of the names that were wrongly referred to that office for investigation.
185-year-old church
Church Street Methodist Church in Selma has become the latest to file suit against its United Methodist Church Conference over its property, reports AL.com’s Greg Garrison.
It’s not the first to try to leave the UMC then face hurdles in disaffiliating. The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that Dothan’s Harvest Church had the right have its case heard in civil court, but it also ruled that a group of 44 churches suing the Alabama-West Florida Conference had to keep their case in the church’s courts.
Church Street Methodist is asking a judge to declare that the property belongs to its congregation, not its denomination.
The church has around 350 members. It dates back 185 years, so long ago that, according to church history, it sits on the only land in Selma that’s never been bought or sold.
Quoting
“I got a call from Katie Britt, a young, just a fantastically attractive person from Alabama.”
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In 1956, astronaut Mae Jemison of Decatur. She was the first Black woman in space.
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