A Mobile County jury has found a Prichard man guilty of murder in the 2011 shooting death of Sam Richardson, a longtime neighborhood barber whose small shop at Garrison and Main streets had been a fixture of daily life in the community for years. Jurors returned the guilty verdict against Andrew Amison after deliberating for nearly a full day, closing out a trial that leaned heavily on forensic evidence and testimony from Richardson’s widow. The verdict arrives more than two years after the killing, closing one of the more wrenching cases to move through Mobile County’s courts in recent memory.
Prosecutors argued the killing was carried out during a robbery, even though investigators later determined that Richardson was carrying almost nothing of value at the time he was attacked. That gap between the theory of the crime and the reality of what the 60-year-old barber actually had in his pockets became the emotional core of the trial, and it framed the case as one in which a life was taken for a payoff measured in a few dollars and a set of car keys.
Richardson, 60, was found dead inside his barbershop on Nov. 22, 2011. According to testimony from a forensic expert presented on Jan. 15, he had been shot twice, once in the back of the head and once through the bottom lip. Investigators said the only items missing from the scene were Richardson’s cell phone, wallet and car keys, none of which have ever been recovered. The forensic testimony walked jurors through the sequence and nature of the wounds, establishing the physical record on which the prosecution’s account of the robbery rested.
The robbery theory presented by prosecutors was complicated by testimony about how little cash Richardson actually carried. His wife, Shirley Richardson, told jurors on Jan. 15 that her husband made a habit of keeping his pockets light, both at home and at the shop. “He was always careful not to carry around a lot of money,” she testified. “I found out later on that he only had $3 on him when he was shot. The reason he had $3 was because on Tuesday’s he loved to go to Hart’s chicken and get their 99-cent special. He would get him two pieces. All he had was $3.”
That detail became one of the more striking moments of the trial, underscoring for jurors just how little a man could lose his life over. The image of a barber saving his dollars for a twice-weekly chicken dinner gave the robbery motive a bitter irony, and testimony about his routines — the customers who came through the shop, the family rhythms around his modest earnings — painted a portrait of a man whose daily life was ordinary in every way except for how it ended.
Richardson had cut hair in the Prichard neighborhood for years and was well known to residents who passed through the shop regularly, making his death a painful loss for the surrounding community. The corner of Garrison and Main streets where the shop sat is part of the fabric of Prichard, a small city within Mobile County that has weathered decades of economic strain, and longtime businesses there function as gathering places as much as commercial establishments. Richardson’s shop was that kind of place — a stop where regulars talked, caught up on the neighborhood and looked out for one another.
A Long Road Through the Courts
Amison is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 19. His co-defendant in the case, Broderick Sylvester Brown, was previously convicted of two counts of felony murder and sentenced to 32 years in prison. Alabama law sets the maximum penalty for felony murder at life imprisonment, meaning Amison could face a substantially longer sentence when he returns to court next month. Prosecutors charging the killing under the felony murder doctrine argued that the death occurred during the commission of a robbery, which allows the state to reach a murder conviction even where the evidence leaves questions about who fired which shot or exactly how the encounter unfolded.
The case moved through Mobile County Circuit Court over more than two years, from the initial investigation in late 2011 through separate trials for the two men accused in Richardson’s death. Separate trials are common when co-defendants face the same charges, allowing prosecutors to present each defendant’s case on its own evidence and timeline. The interval between the killing and the verdicts — more than two years of investigation, grand jury review, pretrial motions and two trials — reflects the pace at which serious felony cases move through the docket in a county the size of Mobile, where circuit judges balance murder trials against a full calendar of civil and criminal business.
For the prosecution, the nearly full day of deliberations signaled that jurors weighed the evidence carefully before converging on guilt. Deliberations that long often indicate a jury working through complicated forensic testimony and reconciling witness accounts, and the fact that they reached a unanimous verdict without a hung jury spared the Richardson family the uncertainty of a retrial.
What the Verdict Means for the Community
For neighbors and customers who remember him, the verdict marks a significant step toward closure in a case that shook a corner of Prichard many considered safe and familiar. Violence against a familiar face in a familiar place lands differently than crime reported from across town, and residents who had watched the case wind through the courts for two years followed the trial closely once it reached the courthouse.
The case also illustrates how robbery-motivated killings are prosecuted in Alabama when the takings are trivial. Under the felony murder approach, the state does not have to prove premeditation — only that a death occurred during the commission of a dangerous felony such as robbery. That doctrine exists to ensure that participants in a violent felony answer for deaths that result, whatever the moments inside the building actually looked like, and it is the reason a killing over $3 and a set of keys can carry a sentence up to life in prison.
Richardson’s widow sat through the forensic testimony and gave jurors her own account of the man behind the $3, testimony that likely did as much to shape the jury’s understanding of the crime as the physical evidence did. Sentencing next month will bring the formal end of the case, though appeals in felony murder convictions are routine and can extend the legal process for years. What will not change is the verdict itself: a Mobile County jury has found the man who took Sam Richardson from his barbershop accountable, and a neighborhood that lost one of its fixtures finally has an answer two years in the making.
Prichard and the Barbershop’s Role
Understanding what Richardson’s shop meant to Prichard requires understanding the role small businesses play in the city. Prichard, just north of Mobile, is a community of a few tens of thousands that incorporated more than a century ago and has seen its commercial corridors shrink as retail activity migrated south toward the city and the interstate. In neighborhoods where chain businesses are scarce, the businesses that remain — the corner shops, cafes and barbershops — carry a social weight far beyond their revenues. A barbershop in particular operates as an informal community center: regulars drop in without appointments, conversations range across neighborhood news, and the barber often knows generations of the same family.
That is why the response to Richardson’s death ran so deep in the area around Garrison and Main streets. Customers did not just lose a place to get a haircut; they lost one of the anchors of their daily routine, and the circumstances — an attack inside the shop, in daylight hours familiar to every customer — unsettled a sense of security that had defined the corner for years. Residents who spoke to investigators and later followed the trial were, in many cases, the same people who had sat in Richardson’s chairs.
The Two-Year Timeline, Step by Step
The path from the November 2011 killing to this week’s verdict traced the full arc of a Mobile County murder prosecution. The investigation began immediately after Richardson was found, with detectives working the robbery angle from the start given what was missing from the scene. Arrests followed once investigators developed the two defendants, and the case then went through the grand jury for indictment. Pretrial proceedings in circuit court — motion practice, discovery disputes and scheduling — occupied much of the following year before Brown faced his trial and conviction, with Amison’s trial following on the court’s calendar.
Two counts of felony murder against Brown, as opposed to a single count, reflected the way prosecutors structured the charges around the underlying felony, and his 32-year sentence set one benchmark in the case. Because Alabama caps felony murder punishment at life imprisonment, the sentencing range Amison faces on Feb. 19 runs from a minimum set by statute up to life, and the trial judge will weigh his background and role in the robbery before imposing the term. It remains possible the court will impose a sentence meaningfully longer than Brown’s, given that Amison stood convicted as the principal whose trial the jury just concluded.
The verdict this week does not end the system’s involvement — sentencing and potential appellate review remain ahead — but it does resolve the central question the neighborhood has lived with since November 2011. For a community that watched one of its most familiar figures die over the contents of his own pockets, the jury’s answer after nearly a full day of deliberation closes the hardest part of a long wait, and the Richardson family, which filled the gallery through the forensic testimony and the account of the $3 that defined the trial, can finally mark the case answered.