Two Teenagers Shot on Wormeley Drive Near Navco Road; Gunfire Came From White Nissan

MOBILE, Ala. — Two teenagers were shot Friday night while walking in the area of Vermillion Drive and Wormeley Drive near Navco Road, according to Mobile police. The shooting, which unfolded in a residential neighborhood in the western part of the city, left a 17-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl wounded and sent investigators searching for the occupants of a vehicle that opened fire before disappearing into the night.

Officers were called to the neighborhood around 10:15 p.m. on a report of two people shot. The late-hour call brought Mobile police officers and fire-rescue crews to the intersection area, where they found both teens wounded. The Navco Road corridor, which runs through a dense network of residential streets west of the city center, is a mixed area of single-family homes and rental properties, and gunfire there after dark draws an immediate, heavy police response.

Police said the victims are a 17-year-old male and a 16-year-old female, both of whom suffered non-life-threatening injuries and were taken to a hospital. Their conditions were listed as stable after treatment, according to the department, which noted that neither wound proved life-threatening despite the abruptness of the attack. The teens’ families were notified and rushed to the hospital as officers worked the scene.

Investigators said the two were walking in the area when they were confronted by unknown occupants of a white Nissan. The front-seat passenger opened fire, striking both teens before the vehicle sped away from the scene. The sequence — a confrontation initiated from a moving vehicle, shots fired from the passenger seat, and a rapid departure — is a pattern Mobile detectives have seen repeatedly in recent years, and it makes these cases among the hardest to solve: no exchange between victim and shooter, few witnesses willing to come forward, and a vehicle that can change hands or disappear within minutes.

The scene on Wormeley Drive

The neighborhood around Vermillion Drive and Wormeley Drive sits in the shadow of the Navco Road commercial strip, a stretch of west Mobile that has seen its share of violent incidents in recent years. Streets there are lined with modest homes, apartment complexes and churches, and the presence of gunfire on a Friday night — at an hour when teenagers were simply walking — reverberated through the community.

Officers secured the scene while medics transported the victims, and detectives from the department’s violent crimes section took over the investigation. Evidence technicians marked shell casings and canvassed for surveillance video from homes and businesses in the area, the standard first hours of any Mobile shooting investigation. Investigators will also look at whether cameras on nearby streets captured the white Nissan before or after the shooting.

Mobile’s police department, one of the largest law enforcement agencies in Alabama, has struggled with gun violence concentrated in specific corridors of the city, and commanders have repeatedly urged residents with information to come forward, emphasizing that even anonymous tips can break cases open. The department operates a tip line and accepts tips through Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama, which offers cash rewards for information leading to arrests in violent crimes.

No arrests have been announced as the investigation remains ongoing. Detectives are working to identify the occupants of the white Nissan and to establish a motive, which remains unclear. Anyone with information is asked to contact Mobile police.

Drive-by violence and its toll on Mobile’s young people

The shooting adds to a grim pattern in Mobile, where teenagers have repeatedly been caught up in gun violence — sometimes as intended targets, sometimes, as police often stress in cases like this, as bystanders to conflicts they had no part in. Investigators have not said whether the two teens shot on Wormeley Drive were specifically targeted, and detectives typically keep that question open while they run down the backgrounds of victims and any prior disputes connected to the area.

The white Nissan described by investigators is a detail police hope the public can help with. Vehicles used in drive-by shootings are frequently abandoned, repainted or swapped within days, so tips that come in early — a tag number, a direction of travel, a description of the people inside — carry outsized value. Detectives note that even fragments of information can place a vehicle on a route and connect it to other incidents.

The Navco Road area takes its name from one of west Mobile’s older corridors, a road that links residential neighborhoods to the commercial strips along Airport Boulevard and Mobile’s western suburbs. The streets around Vermillion and Wormeley drives are typical of the city’s postwar subdivisions — quiet blocks where most violence, until it happens, feels like something that happens somewhere else. Residents there, as in other Mobile neighborhoods touched by gunfire, have organized watch groups and pressed for increased patrols.

How these investigations proceed

Mobile police investigate shootings of this kind through a combination of neighborhood canvassing, surveillance video review, ballistics analysis and cooperation with regional law enforcement partners. Shell casings recovered at a scene can be matched to other shootings through the department’s crime lab connections, sometimes revealing whether a single weapon has moved through multiple incidents. Cell phone data, social media activity and jailhouse informants round out the typical investigative toolkit.

The department also relies on the community infrastructure built around gun violence response. Pastors and neighborhood leaders in west Mobile have repeatedly stood with police at crime scenes to appeal for calm and cooperation, and Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama allows tipsters to submit information anonymously online or by phone, with rewards approved when tips lead to felony arrests.

For the two teens who were wounded, the medical outcome — non-life-threatening injuries — is the rare good news in a night of gunfire. Hospital trauma teams in Mobile treat hundreds of shooting victims a year, and physicians there have been among the loudest voices in local debates about gun violence, describing the cycles of retaliation that bring young people back through emergency room doors.

Detectives continue to ask anyone who was in the area of Vermillion Drive, Wormeley Drive or Navco Road on Friday night — anyone who saw the white Nissan, heard the gunfire, or knows who its occupants might have been — to contact Mobile police. As with every open shooting case in the city, the investigation will move only as fast as the information residents are willing to share.

The response to Friday night’s shooting followed the department’s standard protocol for shootings with multiple victims. Patrol officers established a perimeter, medics ran triage in the street, and a supervisor called out the investigative units. In cases involving juvenile victims, detectives coordinate with family members throughout, both because the teens are minors and because frightened families are often the most reliable source of context about where the victims had been and whom they had been with.

Investigators will also examine whether the shooting connects to any recent incidents in west Mobile. Detectives routinely compare notes on vehicle descriptions, shooting locations and victim backgrounds, looking for threads that link cases. A white Nissan with an armed front-seat passenger, if it appears in other reports, could tie Friday night’s gunfire into a broader pattern — and surveillance cameras along the Navco Road and Airport Boulevard corridors may hold the images that do it.

The timing matters as well. A shooting just after 10 p.m. on a Friday night means ordinary weekend activity — people coming home from games, work or visiting family — formed the backdrop, and detectives count on that traffic to have produced witnesses who have not yet called. Police typically appeal twice in such cases: once immediately, and again days later when recollections have settled and loyalties have been reconsidered.

Citywide, Mobile leaders have debated a range of responses to gun violence involving young people, from expanded youth programming and summer employment to focused deterrence programs that bring targeted outreach to those most at risk. The police department has also adjusted its deployment patterns to concentrate resources in the corridors where violence clusters, west Mobile among them. None of it, commanders concede, substitutes for a witness picking up the phone in the first days after a shooting.

For now, the case remains open, the white Nissan remains unidentified, and two teenagers are recovering from wounds that could easily have ended their lives. Anyone with information is urged to contact Mobile police or to leave an anonymous tip through Crime Stoppers of Metro Alabama, where information that leads to an arrest in a violent felony can qualify for a reward — and where, detectives stress, the smallest detail about that night on Wormeley Drive could be the one that matters.

Hours after the shooting, neighbors on the quiet residential block were still piecing together what they had heard. Some described a burst of gunfire followed by the sound of an engine accelerating away — the recurring soundtrack of the city’s drive-by violence. Detectives will spend the coming days converting those fragments into a timeline, and they are asking anyone who lives along Vermillion Drive, Wormeley Drive or the streets near Navco Road to check home security cameras for footage from Friday night, even if nothing seemed amiss at the time.