Missing evidence collected by the Prichard Police Department contributed to the dismissal of a capital murder case tied to a 2022 double homicide, Mobile County District Attorney Keith Blackwood confirmed Wednesday, adding a new dimension to the fallout from long-running problems inside the department’s evidence room.
Blackwood said the capital murder case against Julian Demond Woods, who was accused in the June 1, 2022, shooting deaths of Henisha Scott and Michael Trotter, could not proceed in part because key pieces of digital evidence gathered by Prichard police could not be located.
The confirmation turned a case that had already unraveled for one well-known reason into something more serious: a capital prosecution collapsing for two reasons at once — witnesses who could not be found, and evidence that apparently no longer exists.
A Case Already Weakened by Missing Witnesses
Woods was indicted on three counts of capital murder in connection with the shooting, which took place on West Main Street in Prichard. According to the indictment, prosecutors alleged Woods intentionally caused the deaths of Scott and Trotter during a single course of conduct, with two of the capital murder counts alleging the victims were shot while inside a vehicle.
Under Alabama law, a killing becomes capital murder when it involves multiple victims in a single course of conduct, among other aggravating circumstances, and the vehicle counts tracked provisions that elevate a shooting into capital territory when the victims are inside a car. A capital conviction carries the possibility of life without parole or the death penalty, which raises the evidentiary stakes for any prosecution of that weight.
The case had been scheduled for trial in June 2026. Instead, Mobile County Circuit Judge Vicki Davis dismissed it without prejudice after prosecutors told the court they were not prepared to proceed without two key witnesses, Jamia Zabri Campbell and Jada McNeal Jackson. According to the court order, prosecutors said they had exercised due diligence in attempting to locate the witnesses.
An arrest warrant remained outstanding for Campbell at the time of the dismissal. Because the case was dismissed without prejudice, prosecutors retain the ability to seek a new indictment and refile charges if they are able to move forward. Woods was ordered released from the Mobile County Metro Jail on the charges.
The without-prejudice structure matters for everyone involved. For the state, it preserves the option to bring Woods back before a grand jury if the missing witnesses surface or the lost evidence is recovered. For Woods, it means release now but no exoneration — the charges were dismissed on the state’s motion, not decided by a jury, and the allegations remain unanswered in a court of law.
Blackwood Reveals a Second, Previously Undisclosed Factor
While the witness problems had already been publicly known, Blackwood revealed Wednesday that missing evidence from the Prichard Police Department was another major reason prosecutors were unable to move forward.
“That case also had witness issues,” Blackwood said. “We attempted to go forward in the prosecution of that case without the witnesses. However, with the evidence that had been lost, we were unable to do so.”
The statement described a prosecution that had already tried to survive on what it had. Prosecutors weighed going to trial without the two witnesses and calculated that they could not — not because of the witnesses alone, but because the missing evidence stacked on top of the missing people made the case untenable.
Asked what evidence was missing, Blackwood described several digital items investigators have been unable to locate.
“There were videos, thumb drives, complete videos,” he said. “We had been provided with a portion of a video that was a cell phone video taken of a surveillance video, but only a part of it, and not the part that was relevant. So the entirety of the video was somehow misplaced.”
The detail illustrated the chain of losses in miniature. What prosecutors received was a secondhand recording — a phone aimed at a surveillance monitor — and even that arrived incomplete, missing the segment that mattered. The original video files, and the drives that held them, have not been found.
“In a capital murder investigation into a double murder that took place in June of 2022, the whereabouts of various items of evidence apparently collected by the Prichard Police Department are unknown,” Blackwood said during Wednesday’s briefing.
Broader Problems Inside the Evidence Room
The disclosure raises additional questions about how many other criminal cases may have been affected by longstanding issues inside the Prichard Police Department’s evidence room. Blackwood said investigators have already identified multiple failures in how evidence has been handled, including improperly stored firearms, drugs and sexual assault kits.
He also said felony prosecutions have previously been dismissed because felony complaints were never signed by Prichard police officers, and that in multiple cases, suspected controlled substances were never submitted to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for testing.
Each of those failures strikes a different part of the machinery. A signed complaint is the paper that starts a felony charge; without it, the case has no legal foundation, and prosecutors learned that only after charges were already filed. An untested drug seizure means a possession case cannot be proven until the substance finally reaches the state lab — if it ever does. Improperly stored firearms and sexual assault kits raise the hardest questions of all, since those items are often irreplaceable: a lost kit can end a case that a victim waited years to bring.
As of now, three criminal cases have been confirmed dismissed because of missing or unavailable evidence connected to the Prichard Police Department. Those include the 2022 capital murder case against Julian Woods and two additional criminal cases connected to former Prichard police officer Emanuel Dotch, who is now facing criminal charges of his own.
Blackwood said investigators are still working through thousands of pieces of evidence and that it remains too early to determine the full scope of cases that may ultimately be affected.
That warning is the part local courts are watching most closely. Three confirmed dismissals describe what is known today, not what will be known when the cataloging effort ends. Every unlogged gun, unlabeled drive or unopened box in the collection represents a question that only surfaces when a prosecutor, defense attorney or detective goes looking for a specific item and finds that the system cannot say where it is.
Sheriff’s Office Continues Massive Cataloging Effort
The revelations come as the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office continues a months-long effort to catalog and organize thousands of pieces of evidence after taking over day-to-day law enforcement operations in Prichard. The Sheriff’s Office assumed those responsibilities after the District Attorney’s Office requested the move, citing concerns about the department’s handling of evidence and criminal investigations.
The takeover was an extraordinary step — one Alabama law enforcement agency absorbing another city’s patrol and investigative duties — and it reflected a judgment that the problems could not be fixed from inside the department itself. Since then, deputies have been sorting through an evidence collection accumulated over years, working out what each item is, where it came from, and which case it belongs to.
Sheriff Paul Burch said deputies continue finding evidence and property in locations beyond the department’s primary evidence room.
As of Wednesday, investigators had cataloged 12,862 items, including 2,126 firearms, and had recently recovered six additional guns that had not previously been logged.
Burch said organizing the evidence system remains a months-long project.
The scale of the cataloging effort is difficult to overstate. More than twelve thousand items — enough to fill an entire room — must be matched to cases, many of them closed or pending, across several years of Prichard police work. The firearms alone number in the thousands, and each one carries its own chain of questions: where it was seized, whether it is tied to a charging document, whether it has been tested for DNA or ballistics, and whether it must be preserved for an appeal.
What the Dismissal Means for Prichard
For the families of Henisha Scott and Michael Trotter, the dismissal of the case against Julian Demond Woods is the most concrete cost yet of the evidence-room failures. A case built on a 2022 double homicide — three capital counts, two victims shot in a vehicle on West Main Street — has been returned to a filing cabinet instead of a courtroom, and the people accused of no wrongdoing in it, the victims’ relatives, are left waiting on witnesses, videos and thumb drives that may never appear.
For Woods, release from the Metro Jail ends a pretrial detention that stretched across the years between indictment and dismissal. The refiling option keeps the legal question open, but it also leaves him in the uncertain status of a man whose capital charges were dropped for reasons the state describes as institutional rather than evidentiary.
For Prichard itself, the case has become the public face of a larger reckoning. The city’s police department no longer runs its own operations; the Sheriff’s Office is counting more than twelve thousand items left behind; the district attorney has tied three dismissals directly to the department’s record-keeping; and a former officer faces charges of his own. How far the consequences reach — into how many other prosecutions, how many old cases, how many pieces of evidence still unaccounted for — is the question the cataloging effort is slowly answering.
Blackwood’s Wednesday briefing made one point plain: prosecutors cannot rebuild what was never properly kept. The capital murder case against Julian Woods did not fail in a courtroom. It failed, in the district attorney’s account, because the records, videos and drives that should have been sitting in an evidence room on West Main Street’s side of town could not be produced when the trial calendar called for them.