Column: Once Upon A Time In Tuscaloosa

*This is an opinion column*

TUSCALOOSA, AL — I grew up in Tuscaloosa County and vividly remember the hard-scrabble years for many before the Mercedes plant opened in Vance and Nick Saban was hired as the head football coach at the University of Alabama.

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Even living on the more affluent northern side of the Black Warrior River, I went to Northside High at a time when doing so was far from glamorous. In elementary school especially, the majority of my friends lived in trailers and I don't recall having any moderately wealthy friends until young adulthood.

I saw the changes, though.

I'll never forget the parents of some friends moving out of trailer parks and into houses nicer than the one I grew up in. I was taken to football games here and there in those years, but they were never sell-outs and Bryant-Denny Stadium hadn't become quite the college football cathedral it is today.

I hate to seem nostalgic, but in those days a small child could walk along The Strip holding the hand of an elderly relative on an SEC football game day and never have any kind of external stressor other than maybe a drunk frat boy here and there. But today, The Strip on game day or during other busy university events now attracts a loathsome menagerie of opportunistic out-of-town freaks, gun-toting criminals and drunk revelers treating University Boulevard like Bourbon Street.

Indeed, in October 2021, I recorded a disturbing video of one of these not-from-around-here public performers as he stood on the stoop at Buffalo Phils in his faux paramilitary garb hollering "Let's Go Brandon" and "F*ck Joe Biden" in broad daylight with small children around.

Later that same night, another shifty loner wearing an orange wig attempted to peddle overpriced T-shirts to passersby and my family — shirts that featured the likenesses of President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris accompanied by the tasteless phrase: "Joe and The Hoe."

Sure, I understand this is Trump country, but a little class and restraint never hurt anybody.

Even apart from the much more insidious criminal element that has reared its head time and again on The Strip during busy weekends, this is not the Tuscaloosa I grew up in.

Far from it, in fact.

Looking back, the economic tidal shift after Mercedes-Benz U.S. International got up and running was undeniable in the 1990s, even for a small child. Meanwhile, the football program at Alabama was beleaguered with NCAA violations and poor coaching after 1992, but we loved it anyways.

Hell, we even bounced back with Shaun Alexander and had something to be excited about for a brief time. Then came the Rich Rodriguez rumors, the Mike Price debacle and the eventual Mike Shula Era that gave us what we have today.

But I was on the verge of graduating high school when that sleek private jet landed at the Tuscaloosa Municipal Airport and Nick Saban walked down those stairs. In the years that followed and without moving a finger himself, Saban transformed the landscape of Tuscaloosa in a way that even exceeded the works of Bear Bryant — community buy-in and generosity the likes of which the area may never see again. Lightning in a bottle.

It was truly magical when reflecting on certain aspects of the Tuscaloosa I grew up in.

All of a sudden, we became cosmopolitan. New restaurants, bars and trendy hotels began to sprout up everywhere. People were proud to be from Tuscaloosa and that was something completely new to me. It certainly felt good to have a sense of place.

And an entire metro grew as a result. In my childhood, apart from The Quad and tales of days gone by, Tuscaloosa wasn't a marquee college town by any stretch. We had good barbecue and fun tailgating, sure, but just about every SEC college town is likely to lay claim to similar attractions and argue that they do it better than their peers.

Saban made it different, though, and he more than deserves that statue in the Walk of Champions.

Still, by no direct fault of the legendary coach, Tuscaloosa benefited from the on-field success and grew faster than anyone expected, slowly becoming a different place from the one where I grew up. Then consider the widespread redevelopment and massive influx of federal aid money following the devastating tornado in 2011 that cut a path through Tuscaloosa that's still visible to this day if you know where to look.

A longtime patron of Temerson Square, The Strip was never my scene and always seemed a place more fitting for the excitable college kids and the townies who didn't mind them. There was trouble here and there — the case wherever libations are served — but it was never really overwhelming or out of control.

If you remember, Temerson Square, after all, was the scene of a mass-shooting at the Copper Top that injured 17 people in 2012, the coverage of which I watched unfold on TV when I was in living in Atlanta. My Dad was a Tuscaloosa Violent Crimes Unit homicide investigator at the time and it was national news.

But fast-forward to the present and the negative attention has shifted to The Strip.

We'd all be lying, too, if we said we didn't see the warning signs.

Think back to Jan. 12, 2021, when local Alabama beat writer and Friend of Patch James Benedetto went viral for his video of thousands inundating The Strip after Alabama won the national championship. An unruly sea of humanity as far as the eye could see — but we were once again national champions and no one died as a result.

But the subsequent A-Day Game that April resulted in a similar scene and multiple arrests — mostly folks from just outside of Tuscaloosa County who came to town to have a good time.

All told, six guns were recovered by police that night, including a pistol modeled after an AK-47 assault rifle.

Tuscaloosa Police Chief Brent Blankley eventually gave the order that night for revelers to clear out from The Strip, but not before pictures began making the rounds on social media.

Again, no one died, but the red flags were there. Policy and the police can only do so much to proactively address such a large influx of people, and the tactics at present from the powers that be have been a more defensive approach than addressing a problem before it starts. It's an unenviable position for a lingering issue that has yet to be validated by any kind of efficacy other than the simple statistic that nobody died.

Then, we arrive at the early morning hours of Jan. 15, 2023 — a date that will be seared into my memory until I'm dust.

The crowds along The Strip were swelled, particularly outside of Twelve25, but the streets weren't blocked so it was a normal, if only busy, Saturday night. The video I saw of that evening showed a packed sidewalk and a line to the curb, but considering the extensive reporting on Twelve25 I've done since that night, it should come as no surprise and certainly played out in a similar fashion Saturday night for the 2023 A-Day Game.

But the morning of Jan. 15, things got ugly.

Words were exchanged. Shots were fired. And at the end of all of it, a young mother — 23-year-old Jamea Harris of Birmingham — was dead and two young men were charged with capital murder: former Alabama basketball player Darius Miles and his childhood friend Michael Davis.

From the onset, it was a devastatingly regrettable chapter in Tuscaloosa's history, but it was a story that, the more it developed, the more it lent insight into the actual dynamics of the Tuscaloosa nightlife that could lead to such a tragedy.

This makes me think back to almost two years ago, when Tuscaloosa Police Chief Brent Blankley said Tuscaloosa had become "the spot" for many in the region on busy weekends, particularly during football season. The conversation was indeed related to gun violence, but the emphasis on Tuscaloosa's draw to outsiders has repeated itself time and again over the two years that followed.

Indeed, Jamea Harris was a Birmingham resident, as was her longtime boyfriend and the father of her child, Cedric Johnson, who shot Michael Davis twice during the deadly altercation on Jan. 15. They had been in Tuscaloosa the day of Alabama basketball's home matchup again LSU, which ended in a blowout and resulted in an inevitable flood of people on The Strip to celebrate.

Hindsight aside, the win was great for business and, until blood was shed, the night was mostly a quiet one, comparatively speaking. Once the smoke cleared just before 2 a.m., though, a young mother was dead and, 15 hours later, Davis and Miles were charged with capital murder.

Much has been said about the gun culture of the Alabama basketball team in the aftermath, which admittedly seems more warranted than ever at present. But this simply didn't seem the tell-tale case at the time.

David Miles — Darius's father — even said on a podcast his son hadn't grown up playing with guns. Rather, he said his son started carrying one after having a gun pulled on him during his time in Tuscaloosa.

Even more has been said about the Brandon Miller connection that night.

But keep in mind, had there never been a shooting and Miller had been pulled over for police to find an unregistered handgun in the vehicle that belonged to someone else, he would have been free to go without issue. This argument is based solely on the Alabama law that went into effect Jan. 1, 2023, which repealed the state's requirement for a pistol permit to conceal carry a handgun or to transport a pistol in one's vehicle without a license.

There's obviously more to the story, though. On Monday, Tuscaloosa Patch was first to break the story that a highly touted NCAA Transfer Portal prospect committed to the Alabama basketball program —Wichita State's Jaykwon Walton — was arrested Saturday night in Tuscaloosa for misdemeanor marijuana possession.

When police made contact with Walton and the two others in that car on Reed Street, multiple loaded guns were also found — a much more ominous discovery than the sizable amount of weed that resulted in misdemeanor criminal charges for Walton and another man from Bessemer.

But given the circumstances of that night where Walton was at least tangentially involved, several large groups of motorists around Tuscaloosa prompted multiple calls to police throughout the night. One man even ended up at DCH Regional Medical Center with a gunshot wound after a "shots fired" call in the area of Jack Warner Parkway.

Consider this scene from the following Sunday: TPD confirmed to Patch that reports from DLP Tuscaloosa, an apartment complex on Alabama Highway 69 South, indicated there was at least 1,000 people at the impromptu shindig and several hundred vehicles in the immediate aftermath of the chaos Saturday night for the A-Day Game.

In the wake of the news that Walton had been arrested, though, Alabama basketball coach Nate Oats quickly responded to say that Walton — who had not signed with the program or enrolled at the university — was no longer being recruited by the program and would not be a student-athlete at the University of Alabama.

I'm a zealot when it comes to gauging the public temperature of issues I'm actively covering and, after so much cold water was dumped on the white-hot national narrative about the Jan. 15 shooting through my past reporting, we found ourselves right back to where we started in the wake of Walton's arrest.

The point is, we've changed as a city and I can't help but feel we have put ourselves in a position where we can only be reactive, as opposed to the alternative.

Criminal behavior has changed and the day-to-day dynamics of our society have changed, which trickles down to the way individuals act. The changes are at all levels of society, too: Less restrictions on guns than ever before in Alabama; not enough police to address major events; lawmakers indifferent to the day-to-day violence in their communities; a Tuscaloosa nightlife that seems to make its own rules; and a justice system that falls short of its duties.

It's The Guns, Sort Of

In reference to those arguing about a corrosive "gun culture" within the Alabama men's basketball program, I'd rebut that such a focus is too shallow and ignores the much more pervasive infatuation with guns in Alabama. We are a state where the toughest of the tough guys are scared of their own shadows and have personal vaults full of military-grade assault weapons.

Never mind that the government they fear so much has $30 million Predator Drones that can grease any moving target from above at 50,000 feet.

As for an anecdote to underscore this lust for guns in our corner of the country, I think back to my interview with fringe author Greg Hopkins in February 2022 during the BamaCarry Statewide Convention in Jasper.

"[The Bible] tells us Jesus never taught pacifism," Hopkins told me. "It said that God commands us to defend the innocent and blesses us for it. It's in Genesis right through Revelation ... and I think I proved that."

I just smiled and gave a nod in response. What else was there to say?

Indeed, with the passage of the constitutional carry bill that went into effect at the start of the new year, the prevailing sentiment among supporters of the measure is that it makes it easier for "good guys" to carry handguns where "Big Guv'Ment" can't see them. Never mind the simple fact that more guns on the streets — legal or not — will inevitably result in more guns being stolen and used during the commission of violent crimes.

The main thing this belief ignores, though, is that such a law makes it equally easy for the "bad guys" to own guns, all while police in Alabama are now prohibited from inquiring about the presence of a concealed handgun during traffic stops.

And don't you forget, when Jaykwon Walton and another man were arrested Saturday night, it was for misdemeanor marijuana possession ... not the multiple loaded guns found in that car on Reed Street — just a street over from Grace Street, where Jamea Harris was shot and killed in January.

Does this example not truly underscore our priorities as a state? Even when a minor crime like drug possession coincides with the presence of firearms, should the guns not at least factor in when considering the bigger picture?

Again, if you're a supporter of permitless carry, but are among the faceless hoards frothing at the mouth that these boys got off easy, you should probably reconsider your position.

For the crowd demanding "law and order," it's maddening how so many conveniently look past common sense protocols designed to promote a safer society. For some, they view it as patriotic to tote their firearms around like John Wayne ... only until someone different from them gets caught in a situation where the possession of that gun can be used against them in court.

Outside Elements

While loudmouth political weirdos manage to keep finding their way to Tuscaloosa when the crowds along The Strip get big, the more violent elements have also found a lively place here to party, cause mischief and leave without any of the townies or police being any the wiser.

That is, until shots are fired or arrests are made.

Think back to that A-Day Saturday in 2021, when offenders from places like Birmingham, Center Point, Hoover and Moundville were arrested among the chaos along The Strip. As far as this reporter has been able to tell, there wasn't a single Tuscaloosa resident thrust into the spotlight that night. One of the guns recovered by police that night had been reported stolen in Birmingham and at least one individual from Jefferson County was charged with possession of a firearm without a permit — an offense that no longer exists on the Alabama law books.

Fast-forward to this past Saturday for the 2023 Golden Flake A-Day Game and a similar scene unfolded, with crowds gathering in the street, in parking lots and blocking the entrances to businesses along The Strip.

Indeed, the Tuscaloosa Police Department confirmed to me that it was contacted by three businesses on The Strip who said they would be closing because patrons couldn't get in or out of their businesses.

Crowds are normally great for business, but at this scale, things began to get dangerous.

Businesses like Twelve25 — the same club where both groups involved in the Jan. 15 shooting on Grace Street had spent the evening — was warned by Tuscaloosa Police Chief Brent Blankley that the business would be cited with a queuing violation if they failed to get the line outside of the bar under control and in compliance with the ordinance.

This proved a futile gesture, though, as attempts by the business's staff came up well short of effectively managing the situation, resulting in the business deciding to close for the evening.

In a separate incident, TPD said one business requested officers at the location because people were loitering, racing and parking in the middle of Grace Street.

Meanwhile, another business owner asked TPD for help dispersing a crowd because people were urinating on the side of his building. And in another troubling instance, TPD dispatch also received a call from a woman inside a bathroom, where she had locked herself inside with several others after hearing people in the vicinity had guns.

Other reports included TPD officers making contact with individuals who were armed with loaded weapons, business owners reporting patrons were smoking marijuana inside their establishments and at least one stolen firearm recovered during the evening.

As all of this was going on, however, Patch previously reported that several large groups of motorists had been reported at different locations around the city. And it was in one of those groups that Jaykwon Walton and a man from Bessemer were arrested for second-degree possession of marijuana.

"We also received several complaints from residents in the areas of Reed and Grace streets because of crowds congregating in their parking lots, drinking and smoking marijuana," TPD spokeswoman Stephanie Taylor told Patch in an email response. "Officers declared the area as overcrowded a little after 9 p.m., telling people they could be in the area if they were going to a business, but to otherwise move along."

That weekend, which also included a fatal shooting at Aspen Village Apartments that was unrelated to the revelry on The Strip and believed to be done in self-defense, was a chaotic one for local police and is sure to not be the last.

A new football season this fall will bring with it a fresh set of challenges and, given the draw of the Tuscaloosa nightlife and the lack of repercussions for playing with guns, we will more than likely be having this same conversation again before too long.

Where's The Justice?

In my numerous background conversations with an expansive spectrum of trusted sources, an argument that stood out focused on the criminal courts in Tuscaloosa County.

Historically speaking, some argue that lax sentencing for offenses where guns are involved has possibly contributed to Tuscaloosa's reputation as a place where one can cause felonious trouble and, if you get caught, end up with little more than a slap on the wrist and probation.

Now, compare that to the other much smaller surrounding counties, other than Jefferson County, that have a fraction of the violent crime and drop the hammer on violent offenders to prove a point, if nothing else.

For example, in January I reported that a man was sentenced for a shootout on June 14, 2019, at the corner of McFarland Boulevard and Highway 43 in Northport, where more than 30 rounds were fired. Despite the gravity of the situation, the two parties involved must have been piss-poor triggermen, considering nobody was even nicked in the exchange of bullets.

At trial, though, prosecutors with the Tuscaloosa County District Attorney's Office requested three concurrent 30-year sentences for the attempted murder charges and two 20-year sentences for the Class B felonies. Instead, the suspect entered an open plea to the charges and received five 20-year terms to run concurrently. He was also denied probation.

This is a seemingly benign example, sure, and not even one that occurred inside the Tuscaloosa city limits. But it's also an anecdote that seems to highlight conflicting approaches by state prosecutors and elected judges when it comes to violent crimes. I'm not here to say who is more on the side of right in these cases, I'm merely a paid observer.

But it does give one pause when trying to understand why Tuscaloosa has become such an attractive hub for criminal activity during big events like football games.

In multiple conversations, the same aforementioned background sources pointed to harsher approaches to sentencing by judges in the counties surrounding Tuscaloosa as a possible explanation for what makes our city's nightlife so attractive. I have nothing to validate such claims, but it certainly is a compelling possibility.

And in other conversations, the aforementioned notion was flatly refuted, particularly with respect to the fact that the City of Birmingham has a record of giving bond to offenders charged with capital murder — something that, at least as far as the record shows, hasn't happened in Tuscaloosa in three decades.

Still, the problems we see play out in the news cycle day-in, day-out, are much broader in scope than a trigger-happy college basketball team or a lack of effort on the part of local law enforcement.

No, the issues we're seeing can't be interpreted through the lens of identity politics, college fandom or what social media personalities tell you to think.

This is a nuanced, hyperlocal epidemic that no one has the ability to address other than us yokels who are left here to clean up the mess after the game day crowds clear out and head home.

Ryan Phillips is an award-winning journalist, editor and opinion columnist. He is also the founder and field editor of Tuscaloosa Patch. The opinions expressed in this column are in no way a reflect of our parent company or sponsors. Email news tips to ryan.phillips@patch.com.