A Mobile County judge has closed out a long-running legal saga tied to the 2011 killing of a well-known Prichard barber and lay minister, handing down new, single sentences to the two men convicted in his death after an appellate court found their original sentencing improper.
Sam Richardson, 60, widely known around Prichard as “Mr. Sam,” was shot to death on Nov. 22, 2011, inside the small Main Street barbershop where he had cut hair and preached to neighbors for years. Investigators said the shooting happened during a robbery attempt. Testimony from residents who lived and worked near the shop proved central to identifying and convicting his killers.
Broderick Brown, now 23, and Andrew Amison, now 20, were tried separately, in October 2013 and January 2014 respectively, and each was found guilty of two counts of felony murder in Richardson’s death. Mobile County Circuit Judge Robert Smith initially sentenced both men to concurrent 32-year prison terms.
Late last year, however, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals set aside those dual convictions, citing an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that bars multiple convictions and multiple sentences for felony murder when both charges stem from a single killing. The appellate panel sent the cases back to Judge Smith with instructions to adjudicate each man guilty of a single count of felony murder and resentence him accordingly.
Smith complied with that order for Brown on Nov. 7, issuing one 32-year sentence. Brown is now serving that time at Bullock Correctional Facility in Union Springs. Amison, who investigators have suggested may have been the one who fired the fatal shot, received his amended single sentence of 32 years more recently and is serving it at Kilby Correctional Facility in Mount Meigs. Neither man’s family, nor Richardson’s relatives, attended the brief resentencing hearing. When the judge asked Amison if he wished to address the court, he declined.
The case left a lasting mark on the Prichard community. Richardson had operated his barbershop for decades and was remembered as much for his ministry as for his haircuts. In the months after his death, a local Christian outreach group tied to a nearby inner-city ministry helped repaint and spruce up the shuttered shop as a small tribute. That effort was undercut, though, when a fire later damaged the structure. Richardson’s daughter has said the family hopes to eventually convert the site into some form of community or cultural space in her father’s memory, though no timeline for that project has been announced.
For a community still processing the loss of a figure many considered a fixture of daily life on Main Street, the resentencing closes one chapter of a case that stretched across more than three years of trials and appeals, even as questions about the future of Richardson’s longtime shop remain unresolved.