Samuel Shelby

It was just five days before Christmas in 2010 when a night of holiday shopping ended in a fatal ambush for two friends, a crime Birmingham police believe was a tragic case of mistaken identity. Samuel Arthur Shelby, a 32-year-old Black man, and his friend, Julian Tarver, also 32, were found shot to death inside a car in the early hours of Monday, December 20, 2010, their lives cut short in a burst of violence in the Ensley neighborhood.

The initial call to police reported shots fired around 2:30 a.m. Officers were dispatched to the 1300 block of 57th Street, where they discovered the two men deceased inside a Cadillac DeVille that had come to a stop behind a Pizza Hut. Investigators determined the shooting had not happened there, but rather about two blocks away, near the intersection of Bessemer Road and 57th Street. It appeared the car, riddled with bullets and its driver's-side windows shattered, had rolled to its final position after the attack. A witness told police they heard gunfire and the sound of another vehicle speeding away.

In the days that followed, a heartbreaking theory emerged. Birmingham Police Chief A.C. Roper stated that both Samuel Shelby and Julian Tarver had clean records and no trouble with the law, leaving investigators to question the motive. They developed information suggesting the two men were not the intended targets. The killing, they believed, was rooted in a car break-in that happened earlier that same morning.

Police learned that a Pontiac Bonneville parked behind a house on Avenue N had been burglarized. One of the suspects in that break-in was described as having dreadlocks and fleeing in a Cadillac. Julian Tarver, who was driving the Cadillac with Samuel as his passenger, wore his hair in dreadlocks. Investigators came to believe that the owner of the burglarized Pontiac, seeking retaliation, had hunted down the wrong men. The owner of that car was publicly identified by police as Tyler Griffin, who they named as a person of interest they needed to question.

While police stressed that Griffin was not charged with a crime, they believed he was connected to the events that led to the deadly shooting. They theorized that in the darkness and anger of the moment, Griffin or his associates mistook Tarver and Shelby for the men who had broken into his car. The two friends were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, ambushed as they returned from a trip to a local Walmart.

The case took a tragic and complicated turn years later. Tyler Griffin, the person of interest in the 2010 double homicide, was himself shot and killed on Mother's Day, May 14, 2017, in Birmingham. According to police reports, Griffin, then 32, was at a gathering on Boise Avenue when an argument broke out. As he was walking away, he was shot multiple times in the back. His murder, like the one he was once publicly linked to, remains unsolved. His family has made public pleas for witnesses to come forward, but no arrests have been made in his death.

The deaths of Samuel Shelby and Julian Tarver remain officially unsolved. The theory of mistaken identity hangs over the case, a painful reminder of a chain of events that likely began with a petty property crime and ended with two innocent men losing their lives. Their killer or killers have never been brought to justice. The Birmingham Police Department and Crime Stoppers have previously offered a cash reward for information leading to an arrest. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Birmingham Police Department's Homicide Unit or Crime Stoppers at (205) 254-7777.