One dead after barrage of bullet fired outside popular Mobile sporting goods store

MOBILE, Ala. (WPMI) — It was not the firework one expects nor wants on the Fourth of July.

Shots, perhaps more than a dozen, fired right outside the front door of Academy Sports and Outdoors in Mobile’s Festival Center.

It happened shortly before 5 p.m.

But when police arrived, there was no victim to be found.

He would later turn up at a local hospital, and was pronounced dead a short time later.

Officers got to work, cataloging the crime scene.

But one man witnessed the shooting from his vehicle.

He doesn’t want to be seen, but here’s how he described it to NBC 15’s Aubrey Spears.

“I was sitting in my car and all of a sudden I heard gunshots. And I saw a bunch of guys running around just shooting at the vehicle and that was pretty much it.”

“How many guys did you see shooting?”

“About 4 or 5 guys.”

“Can you describe what they looked like at all to you?”

“Uh, I just remember seeing four guys and hearing gunshots. I kind of ducked and looked around to make sure it wasn’t coming my way.”

“Do you know what kind of guns they had, from what you saw, were they, like, handguns?”

“Uh, definitely handguns, 9 mm.”

“How many gunshots did you hear?”

“About 15 or 20 shots.”

“Wow. And they were firing at one car?”

“That’s what it looked like.”

The witness tells Aubrey that car was a silver sedan.

A short time later, Mobile Police were focused on a silver sedan parked outside the Springhill Medical Center emergency room, the car’s emergency flashers still on.

George Rothering is about to start a new teaching job this fall not too far from the store where this all happened. He and his wife, Beth, a pharmacy tech, happened to pull up just as police were arriving.

“This is a dead end,” he said. That’s what he says he would tell his new students if they saw such a crime scene. “Well, we only saw the first couple of cop cars and we’re thinking, I wonder what they’re doing? And as we come around we see crime scene tape and everyone there. And then we come inside and there was a guy that kind of got caught in the crime scene tape.”

George has no idea who the victim is or why he died.

But he says lives can be turned around.

He’s says he’s seen it happen with a close relative of his own.

It’s a message he wants young people today to hear.

“You don’t have to get trapped in any kind of lifestyle you are in,” says George. “There’s always a way out, there’s always a silver lining around a dark cloud. You can always improve yourself. You don’t have to feel like, I’m drowning. There’s always a hand reaching out.”

And as he prepares for his new teaching job, his wife, Beth, says she can’t help but be concerned.

“I worry about it, because of how the world is today, and society.”

But who is going to change that?

She pauses for a moment, and looks at her husband.

“Us,” she says.