Janice Irvin says she will never be the same.

Her adopted son, 37-year-old Valdez Stephenson, was gunned down Wednesday night near the family’s longtime Norwood home.

His murder happened one year and 18 days after her other son, 37-year-old Erskin Irvin Jr., was also fatally gunned down outside the house.

“My heart is tore up,’’ the 63-year-old grieving mother said Thursday. “It was devastating with one and I know I birthed that one, but to lose two?”

“I didn’t birth Valdez but he was just like a birth child,’’ she said. “I didn’t love one no more than the other. My heart is aching. It feels like somebody is stepping on it.”

North Precinct officers responded about 10:10 p.m. Wednesday to calls of shots fired in and around the 3200 block of 13th Avenue North.

Once in the neighborhood, police found multiple shell casings in the area. They continued to investigate, and a short time later found Stephenson unresponsive in the yard of a home.

Birmingham Fire and Rescue Service pronounced him dead on the scene at 10:27 p.m.

No arrests have been made, and police have not released any updates into the investigation.

Irvin described Stephenson as quiet, low key.

“He wasn’t a real people person, crowd person,’’ she said. “He liked to be by himself a lot. He loved his (13-year-old) son a lot.”

Stephenson’s family had lived across the street from the Irvin family in Norwood.

“His mom was going through some stuff and my mom ended up getting him when he was a baby,’’ Irvin said. “My mom passed when he was 3, so I went through the courts and raised him as my own.”

“He started out being my brother,’’ she said, “and ended up being my son.”

Irvin, who also has two daughters, said Stephenson was close to her and to Irvin Jr.

“He didn’t ever want to leave me,’’ she said. “I tried to tell him he was grown and get on up out of here but neither one of them wanted to leave me.”

“Now they’re both gone,” she said through tears.

“They were real close,’’ she said. “They were two different people. Erskin was the party one, liked to have fun. Valdez was the laid back one.”

Irvin Jr. died May 11, 2023, when gunmen opened fire on him in the 1400 block of 33rd Street North.

When the ambush shooting stopped, the father of two sons had been hit more than 20 times.

Irvin, a truck driver, had gotten off work and been home only about an hour. He was at the home he shared with his mother in the 1400 block of 33rd Street North.

Home security camera footage showed what happened next.

“You can watch him leaving out of the house,’’ sister Tiffany Irvin previously told AL.com. “He was telling my aunt bye and as he walked down the steps and got in his car, they ran from darkness across the street and shot up his car.”

She said the video showed three masked gunmen carrying out the ambush, standing at his car and unleashing more than 35 rounds.

Family members heard the shots and ran outside.

“You wouldn’t shoot and kill an animal the way they did my brother and did it right in front of our mother’s home,’’ Tiffany Irvin said in an earlier interview. “What could he have possibly done that was so bad?”

“My family hasn’t been the same since this tragedy happened,’’ she said.

Irvin has not spent one night in the Norwood home since her son’s 2023 killing but had actually taken some of her belongings back earlier Wednesday.

She was out with friends Wednesday night when she got a phone call from someone telling her Stephenson had been shot.

She called her sister at the Norwood house and asked if her son was there and was told that he had walked to a nearby store.

Irvin rushed to the scene, and once again saw her neighborhood cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape.

She and other family members tried Stephenson’s cell phone, but there was no answer.

“I didn’t want to believe it,’’ she said. “Everybody was calling him.”

Irvin was overcome with grief in the street, and paramedics were called to tend to her. She was insistent, however, on remaining on the scene until she was officially notified that the victim was indeed her son.

She said she has no idea who killed either of her sons, or why, or if the same gunmen are responsible for both.

“Whoever did it, y’all got parents, I know you got somebody, family that knows what y’all are out here doing,’’ Irvin said. “They’re just as wrong as you are. “

“They just need to stop,’’ she said.

The family is clearly frustrated at the lack of progress in Irvin Jr.’s case, and hope it won’t be the same with the investigation into Stephenson’s killing.

“You just continue to let them sit out here and do this,’’ she said. “Every time I call to try to get an update, I get no kind of update worth listening too. It’s the same stuff over, and over again.”

Irvin said she needs answers, and she needs arrests.

“I think I’d be a little more at ease than I am now,’’ she said, “but I’ll never be the same.”

As for the killer or killers, Irvin said, “I am very, very angry with them. I wouldn’t wish this on them. As much as it hurt me, I wouldn’t wish this on nobody and I just wish they were turn themselves in and just stop,”

“I just want everybody to continue to pray for me and my family,’’ she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do now. I’m just taking it day by day.”