A home security camera on Rickarby Street in Mobile recorded a burst of gunfire late Monday night, capturing video that appears to show at least two people shooting at each other on a residential block where neighbors say they have spent years ducking stray rounds.
The camera belongs to Genade Cooley, a Rickarby Street resident who is herself a survivor of gun violence. In July, Cooley was shot in the head by a stray bullet while she sat in her car in her own driveway.
Mobile police said no injuries were reported in connection with Monday night’s shooting. Investigators are asking anyone with information to contact the department. No suspects have been publicly identified, and no one has been charged.
A Neighbor of Twenty Years Points to the Bullet Holes
Vernon Coleman has lived on Rickarby Street for more than two decades. In that time, he said, the shooting has gotten worse, and he has stopped doing things that used to be ordinary — like leaving his car at the curb.
“I can’t park my car in front no more,” Coleman said. “It got shot up. This the second time it got shot up. Now I got to put my car in the driveway.”
Coleman pointed out bullet holes in both his vehicle and his house. He said residents should not have to think about whether they are standing in the path of somebody else’s argument, and he said he hopes something can be done to protect the block he has called home for 20 years.
His prescription is simple, and it is the one police departments repeat constantly without always being believed: neighbors have to say something.
“If you see something wrong, report it,” Coleman said. “That’s the only way to improve the whole neighborhood.”
Another Call on the Same Street
Monday night was not an isolated event on Rickarby. Mobile police also logged a shots-fired call in the 550 block of Rickarby Street on Sunday, Sept. 13, in which multiple vehicles and a home were struck. No injuries were reported in that incident either.
Two shootings on one short residential street inside a single week, with property hit both times and no one wounded, is the pattern residents describe when they talk about luck running the neighborhood. It is also the pattern that makes cases hard to solve: no victim walks into an emergency room, no one is arrested at the scene, and the evidence is shell casings, damaged siding and whatever a doorbell camera happened to catch.
The Larger Picture in Mobile
What happened on Rickarby Street sits inside a problem South Alabama News examined in detail on Sept. 11 in a report on the city’s homicide crisis. The numbers in that report help explain why a block like this one feels the way it does.
Mobile’s homicide rate stands at roughly 16.4 per 100,000 residents — more than three times the national figure of about 5.0. The city’s violent crime rate, about 752 per 100,000, runs at roughly double the national rate of 359. Put another way, about one in 133 Mobile residents will be the victim of a violent crime.
The city recorded 37 homicides in 2024 and 32 in 2025, down from a peak of 51 in 2021. Firearms were used in 33 of the 37 homicides in 2024.
The report also complicates the assumption that street shootings between strangers drive the death toll. Mobile police have consistently identified domestic violence as the department’s most persistent homicide challenge; of 32 homicides investigated in one recent stretch, only one involved strangers. Most killings in Mobile happen between people who know each other.
There is genuine progress in the data as well. Part 1 crimes — the serious offenses the FBI tracks nationally — fell 56 percent in Mobile between 2014 and 2024, and violent crime has declined about 20 percent since 2022. The Sept. 11 report traced the remaining problem to conditions that no single arrest resolves: concentrated poverty, economic inequality, a long history of disinvestment in Black neighborhoods, and easy access to firearms.
That combination is what residents like Coleman are describing when they say the numbers are improving but their street is not.
What a Shooting With No Victim Costs
An incident in which no one is hit does not generate a homicide statistic, and it rarely generates a headline. It does generate consequences.
Property damage from stray rounds is not covered by anything automatic. A bullet through a car door or a front wall is a deductible, a claim and a premium increase for a household that may be least able to absorb any of the three. Residents who move a vehicle off the street, as Coleman has, are making a small permanent adjustment to their lives because of a risk they did not create.
There is also the matter of what a stray round can do. Cooley’s July injury — a gunshot wound to the head sustained while parked in her own driveway — is the outcome that everyone on the block now has a mental picture of. She survived. The camera that recorded Monday night’s gunfire is on her house.
Repeated gunfire also does quiet damage that does not show up on a report: children kept indoors, older residents who stop sitting on porches, neighbors who stop introducing themselves. Public health researchers have documented the effects of chronic exposure to community violence on sleep, stress and childhood development, and those effects do not require anyone to be struck.
How to Report Information in Mobile
Police have asked for help identifying who fired the shots Monday night. There are several ways to provide information, and more than one of them protects the person providing it.
- Emergencies and shootings in progress: call 911. Gunfire that is happening right now is an emergency call, not a tip.
- Anonymous tips to Mobile police: the department uses a WeTip hotline at (844) 251-0644. Tips can be called in or sent by text to the same number.
- Online: anonymous reports can be submitted through the tip portal linked from the Mobile Police Department’s website.
- Rewards: the department has advertised rewards of up to $1,000 for information, paid upon conviction.
Home security footage is often the most useful thing a resident can offer. Investigators generally ask that video be preserved rather than posted — many consumer camera systems overwrite recordings within days, and clips that circulate on social media before detectives see them can complicate a case. Residents who capture anything, including footage that shows nothing more than a timestamp and the direction of the sound, can note the camera’s location and the exact time and make it available when contacted.
Shell casings, damaged vehicles and bullet holes in structures are also evidence. Police ask that they be left in place and reported rather than cleaned up or repaired before an officer has documented them.
What Residents Are Asking For
Coleman’s request is not complicated and it is not new. He wants to be able to park in front of his house. He wants the people on his street to report what they see. He wants to believe that after 20 years in the same place, the block can still be made safer rather than simply endured.
That is the argument residents across Mobile have been making to the City Council and to the Police Department for several years running — that citywide crime declines are real but unevenly distributed, and that a handful of streets absorb a disproportionate share of what is left.
The investigation into Monday night’s shooting is open. Anyone with information about it, or about the Sept. 13 shots-fired incident in the 550 block of Rickarby Street, is asked to contact Mobile police.