A downtown Mobile resident who watched a shooting unfold late Saturday, July 16, 2011 — one block from the police precinct, at one of the city’s most visible intersections — says gunfire sent people screaming and running through the Lower Dauphin entertainment district. Police arrived quickly and drew their weapons, according to the witness’s account, but made no arrests at the scene.
The account, published as a guest column by a downtown resident and business owner, described hours of growing street congestion before the shots rang out around midnight, then a scene the writer found more disturbing than the violence itself: bar patrons wandering through the crime-scene tape with little reaction while detectives worked.
A Pattern the Numbers Back Up
The column’s editors paired the eyewitness report with a documented history of violence in and around LoDa’s late-night clubs:
- July 5, 2011: A teenager was grazed in the face by a gunshot after hundreds of teens left a dance party at The Temple Downtown, within sight of the police precinct’s back door; a 17-year-old was later arrested on a second-degree assault charge.
- Feb. 10, 2010: DeAngelo Williams, 20, was shot to death near Club Atlantis in the Lower Dauphin district.
- Nov. 10, 2009: A man was shot three times inside Club Atlantis on Dauphin Street — the second shooting at that club in roughly a year, according to Mobile police.
- Since January 2009, police had been called to Atlantis 83 times, half for fights; in May 2008 someone fired a gun inside the club, wounding a patron at the bar.
The incidents have clustered after midnight on weekends around specific venues, but business owners say they color perceptions of the entire downtown. The witness-columnist, a self-described ambassador for downtown Mobile, wrote that after the July 16 shooting he could no longer in good conscience invite friends to LoDa after dark — and called on city leaders to act before the district’s nightlife economy and reputation suffer lasting damage.