A Deadly Afternoon on Wash Branch Road
A Bay Minette man is charged with murder after a deadly stabbing, and court records show it is not the first time he has been accused of killing someone. Deputies with the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office responded to a home on Wash Branch Road in Bay Minette just before 2 p.m. Monday. They found 56-year-old Terry Barnes dead in his front yard.
“It was a stabbing. Unfortunately, the victim was pronounced deceased on the scene,” said Capt. Justin Correa with the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office.
Investigators say witnesses helped deputies identify 55-year-old Lee Snider as a suspect. He was found and arrested several miles away a short time later.
The speed of the arrest reflected the information investigators had almost immediately. Because witnesses saw the confrontation and could describe both the suspect and the direction he left, deputies had a name and a trail within minutes of arriving on scene, and Snider was taken into custody a short distance away before the day was out.
Correa said the two men were known to each other. “They’re friends. They have known each other for what it seems like a long time,” Correa said. “They’re very familiar with each other.”
Correa said witnesses saw the two together Monday and believe an argument escalated quickly. “We’re not exactly sure what led to it, but there was an argument on the scene,” Correa said. “At that point, our suspect, who we have now identified as Lee Snider, produced a knife and stabbed our victim, who we identified as Terry Barnes, multiple times in the chest and abdomen.”
What investigators could reconstruct from witnesses painted a rapid escalation between two men who knew each other well, with no immediate indication of what set the argument in motion. Determining the precise chain of events is the work that follows an arrest, as detectives interview witnesses, collect physical evidence from the yard and the home, and establish the sequence that ended in Barnes’ death.
Held in the County Jail
Snider is being held in the Baldwin County Jail on a murder charge. “This was a violent crime involving a knife and a person dying. We can’t have that in Baldwin County,” Correa said.
According to authorities, this is not the first time Snider has been accused of a fatal stabbing. In 2016, deputies found a man dead in his front yard with a stab wound to the chest in the Crossroads community. Snider pleaded guilty to manslaughter in that case and was sentenced to 10 years in prison.
The similarity between the two cases struck investigators immediately. Both involved a man found dead in his own front yard with stab wounds, both unfolded in communities in the northern part of Baldwin County, and both put the same man at the center of the investigation. In the earlier case, a guilty plea to manslaughter resolved the charge with a ten-year prison sentence, and Snider had since been released.
“He got out of jail. Now we’ve seen it again. He has committed violence once again, or at least alleged to have committed violence. It’s frustrating,” Correa said. “I personally hope that Mr. Snider is not given a bond. I don’t get to control it, but a crime like this shouldn’t deserve one.”
Snider’s bond hearing was set for Wednesday, Aug. 5, at 1:30 p.m.
A Hearing Under Aniah’s Law
Snider made his first court appearance since his arrest at a hearing held under Alabama’s Aniah’s Law, which allows prosecutors to seek to have certain violent offenders held without bond ahead of trial. The hearing was held at the Baldwin County Satellite Courthouse, where prosecutors presented witness testimony and argued Snider poses a danger to the public if released.
Aniah’s Law takes its name from Aniah Blanchard, a 19-year-old Auburn University student who disappeared in 2019 and was later found killed by a man who had been out on bond for a violent crime at the time. The case prompted Alabama voters to approve a constitutional amendment giving judges, for a defined list of serious violent offenses, the authority to deny bail entirely when the state proves clear and convincing evidence that a defendant poses too great a risk to the public to be released. Murder is among the offenses covered, and the hearings that follow look more like mini-trials than routine bond-setting sessions, with witnesses testifying and prosecutors bearing the burden of proof.
The Baldwin County Satellite Courthouse, where the hearing took place, gives the county a facility for proceedings closer to residents in the northern part of the county, separate from the main courthouse in Bay Minette’s county seat operations. The setting mattered little to the substance: what the state had to show was evidence sufficient both to establish probable cause and to convince the judge that no conditions of release could safely manage the risk.
On his way into the courthouse, Snider addressed reporters and claimed self-defense. “I was defending myself,” he said. Asked what he was defending himself against, Snider said, “A friend of mine that has fits of rage,” adding, “He attacked me.”
His account stands in direct contradiction to the witnesses’ description of the encounter, in which they reported that Snider produced the knife and stabbed Barnes multiple times. Reconciling those two versions, the defendant’s claim that he was attacked and the state’s evidence of multiple stab wounds to a man who died in his own yard, will be the central task of the prosecution ahead.
The lead detective on the case told the court that Snider admitted to killing Barnes.
Chief Assistant District Attorney Teresa Heinz said prosecutors pointed to similarities between the current case and Snider’s prior stabbing conviction. “Most of our homicides are gunshot wounds and things of that nature so it was a little different that his choice of weapon is a knife,” Heinz said, noting overlap in the communities where the two stabbings occurred and other facts surrounding the cases.
Heinz also outlined the legal standard prosecutors must meet at an Aniah’s Law hearing: “We have to make a probable cause determination — the judge does — so we have to put forth enough evidence to establish probable cause that the person charged with the crime committed the crime for which they’re charged with and then all the other additional factors that would make them a risk to the public.”
That two-part burden shapes how these hearings are built. First, the state presents enough of its case to satisfy the judge that the charged crime probably occurred and that this defendant probably committed it. Then it moves to the risk analysis, where prior violent history, the circumstances of the current offense and any indication of danger to witnesses or the community all weigh on whether release on any conditions could be made safe.
Forty-Eight Hours to Decide
District Judge Grant Blackburn, who presided over the hearing, has 48 hours to rule on the prosecution’s motion. If he grants it, Snider will remain jailed without bond until trial; if he denies it, the judge will set a bond amount at that time.
The 48-hour window is part of the statute’s design, meant to keep the question of pretrial detention from lingering indefinitely while a defendant sits in jail. A ruling either way carries consequences: detention without bond removes any risk of release but locks in the state’s position before trial, while a set bond leaves the question of safety to whatever conditions and amount the judge chooses.
Update: Snider Denied Bond
District Judge Grant Blackburn has ruled on the prosecution’s motion, and Snider will be held without bond, according to the Baldwin County District Attorney’s Office. The judge denied bond under Aniah’s Law, citing Snider’s previous manslaughter conviction in the 2016 stabbing death of 55-year-old Henry Albert “Butch” Gibson.
Snider will remain in the Baldwin County Jail without bond ahead of trial.
The ruling makes Snider one of the defendants in Baldwin County to be held under the pretrial detention authority Alabama voters added to the constitution, and the judge’s citation of the prior manslaughter conviction shows exactly how the law is meant to work: a documented history of fatal violence counts directly against any argument that release can be managed safely.
With the bond question settled, the case moves into the pretrial phase that will determine how it is ultimately resolved. Prosecutors will present the case to a grand jury, which decides whether the murder charge proceeds to indictment, and both sides will continue developing evidence, from forensic analysis of the scene to the complete accounts of the witnesses who watched the argument escalate.
What Manslaughter and Murder Mean Here
The legal difference between the 2016 case and this one is significant. Manslaughter, the charge Snider pleaded guilty to in Gibson’s death, generally involves a killing committed under circumstances short of intentional murder, often in the heat of passion or as a result of recklessness, and it carried a ten-year sentence. Murder, the charge he now faces in Barnes’ death, requires the intentional killing of another person, and it carries the state’s most serious penalties.
That distinction, and the possibility that the current charge could be resolved differently than the last one, is the backdrop for every decision from this point forward. A guilty plea ended the 2016 case without a trial. Whether this one ends the same way, or goes before a Baldwin County jury, will depend on the evidence that emerges in the months ahead.
The Community’s Question
For residents of the Crossroads community and Bay Minette’s northern neighborhoods, the case reopens a question that never fully went away after the 2016 conviction: how a man convicted in one fatal stabbing could be free to stand accused of another. The frustration Correa voiced, that the earlier sentence allowed Snider’s release, is a sentiment the case is likely to keep alive as it moves through the courts.
The trial, whenever it comes, will answer the immediate legal question of what happened in Barnes’ front yard. The larger question, how Alabama’s system balances a defendant’s right to bail against a community’s safety, has already been answered by the judge’s ruling and by the voters who put that authority in the constitution: when the history shows a pattern of fatal violence, a defendant can be held without bond until the case is resolved.
Barnes’ death also leaves behind the ordinary grief of a sudden loss, a 56-year-old man killed in his own front yard by, according to the sheriff’s account, a longtime friend. As the case proceeds, the witnesses who saw it unfold will carry the weight of having watched it, and the determination they provided in the first minutes after the stabbing, the name and direction that led to Snider’s arrest, is what turned a backyard tragedy into a case the county’s courts will now decide.