Recent violence around Webb Avenue in Mobile has upended the lives of one family in particular, whose matriarch says she has lived on the street for 15 years without ever imagining the toll the past six months would take.
In that span, one of her sons was fatally shot, another was arrested in connection with a separate killing, and a suspicious fire tore through her home. “I wouldn’t have imagined all this amount of stuff that has been put on us the last few months,” she said. “There’s been nothing but disaster.”
The trouble began in earnest in December 2013, when one of her sons was fatally shot at an apartment complex near Webb Avenue, in a case that remains unsolved. She acknowledged her son had ties to street life but said that didn’t change how she felt about him. She recalled seeing him for the final time the night before he died, when she met him briefly to hand over a house key — the only item investigators were later able to return to her.
The day before that shooting, her son had served as a pallbearer at the funeral of a close friend who had himself been fatally shot on Webb Avenue in a case still before a grand jury. The friend’s sister said she believes her brother’s emotional reaction at that funeral, where he was seen crying and screaming, may have contributed to his own death days later.
More recently, a nighttime fire tore through the family’s home, causing an estimated $20,000 in damage and displacing the mother and another son, who is blind and often home alone in the evenings. She believes the fire may have been set intentionally, and police have said the fire’s origin remains under investigation. Around the same time, gunfire struck the home of her sister next door, and a third man was fatally shot while sitting in a car nearby.
A different son was later arrested in connection with that shooting and is currently held in custody out of state. The mother said she has heard rumors that he could face danger if he returns to Mobile.
She said she now sometimes wears a disguise and drives a rental car when she returns to check on the property, out of concern for her own safety.
Mobile police have designated the Webb Avenue corridor a crime hot spot, conducting raids and making multiple arrests, largely targeting low-level drug activity that officers say has fueled much of the unrest. Residents, including the grieving mother and the friend’s sister, are skeptical that drugs alone explain the violence. “No one piles up at one house,” the sister said. “This is not drug activity.” The mother agreed, saying the street had never seen this level of violence before this year.
Police activity in the area continues, even as families along Webb Avenue try to make sense of a stretch of months unlike any they can remember.