A Jefferson County grand jury cleared a Birmingham police officer who fatally shot a man after the suspect tried to seize the officer’s Taser in a hospital parking deck.
The panel found no criminal charges were warranted against the seven-year veteran after reviewing the Aug. 13 shooting of 38-year-old Matthew Sean Massey outside UAB St. Vincent’s hospital in Birmingham, Ala.
Jefferson County District Attorney Danny Carr said the grand jury concluded the officer’s actions were justified under the facts and the law. Police1 reported the decision after the district attorney’s office presented the case.
Carr described a complete review of the evidence gathered in the Birmingham Police Department investigation.
"After a full and fair consideration of all the evidence, the Jefferson County grand jury decided that charges were not warranted and that the officer’s actions were justified based upon the facts and the law,"
Carr said.
The encounter started around 12:35 p.m. on Aug. 13 when a security guard flagged down the officer and reported that Massey had assaulted an employee at a Southside McDonald’s.
Police said Massey had already run across University Boulevard. The officer tried to detain him. Massey did not comply.
Birmingham Police Chief Michael Pickett laid out the sequence for the public.
"That individual did not comply, and a foot pursuit ensued,"
Pickett said.
Massey ran into the parking deck near the hospital’s North Tower. The officer ordered him to stop. Again, he refused.
"Again, the individual did not comply,"
the chief said.
That pattern of refusal matters. Officers are trained to stop a fleeing suspect who has just been accused of assault. When the suspect keeps running into a crowded hospital complex, the risk climbs for everyone nearby, patients, staff, and bystanders.
Inside the deck, the officer deployed his Taser to end the chase and take Massey into custody. According to the chief, Massey then tried to take the weapon.
"The individual began to attempt to gain control of the officer’s taser,"
Pickett said.
A Taser in a suspect’s hands is no longer a tool of control. It becomes a weapon that can disable the officer and leave him open to attack with his own firearm. That is the moment many use-of-force reviews treat as a lethal threat.
The officer fired. Emergency personnel reached Massey and tried to save him. He was pronounced dead at the scene at 12:51 p.m., roughly 16 minutes after the first contact.
Police briefly called for all available help, then stood most units down and sent officers back to their precincts. Traffic on University Boulevard was blocked while the scene was secured.
Grand juries exist to test exactly these split-second decisions against the law, much as other high-stakes probes put evidence before citizens rather than headlines, a dynamic also visible when a federal grand jury subpoena hits a political PAC and forces a paper trail into the open.
Birmingham police led the inquiry into the deadly force. The officer’s name was not released. After the department finished its work, Carr’s office reviewed the file and chose to put the case before a Jefferson County grand jury instead of making a solo charging call.
That handoff is how the system is supposed to work. Local prosecutors place the evidence in front of citizens who answer only to the law. The same citizen-panel check appears in larger fights over accountability, including cases where officials face a federal grand jury subpoena in a Russiagate probe and must answer under oath.
Here, the grand jury heard the state’s presentation and declined to indict. No criminal charges will follow from this shooting under the decision Carr announced.
Massey was 38 and originally from Pensacola. An online obituary from Cason Funeral Service described him as one of the sweetest people his loved ones knew, a lifelong Alabama football fan who grew up on a skateboard, made people laugh, and stayed fiercely loyal to family and friends.
Those tributes belong in the record. So does the conduct police described on Aug. 13: an alleged assault on a restaurant worker, a flight from lawful detention, repeated refusal to stop, and a grab for an officer’s Taser inside a hospital parking deck.
Both things can be true at once. A man can be dear to his family and still force a lethal confrontation when he turns a police weapon against the officer holding it. Soft-on-crime politics often blurs that line. A grand jury that still draws it is doing the basic job voters expect.
Public integrity fights elsewhere show how quickly process becomes combat once politics enters the room, whether the target is a former White House aide in a push for a DOJ indictment over alleged lies to Congress or a governor caught in a federal criminal probe of donor-funded travel. In Birmingham, the panel stayed on the evidence in front of it.
The criminal case against the officer is over. The grand jury spoke. Carr made the outcome public.
Open questions remain outside that verdict. Body-worn camera details were not described beyond the chief’s summary. The precise medical findings past “shooting death” were not released in the account. Any internal discipline file or civil claim, if one exists, sits beyond what officials put out with the no-charge decision.
None of those gaps revise the core sequence the grand jury accepted: non-compliance, a Taser deployment, a struggle for that Taser, and shots fired when the officer faced losing it. Even watchdogs who leave other investigations, as when Joseph diGenova resigned from a DOJ probe after losing confidence at the top, still leave the underlying evidence for others to weigh. In this case, citizens already weighed it.
Officers should not have to guess whether seizing their Taser counts as a deadly threat. In Jefferson County, a grand jury just answered that question with clarity the public can live with.