Staff Report

An arrest was pending on Tuesday in the shooting death of a former high school football player from Frisco City during a Fourth of July celebration that turned violent outside a Fairhope bar.

An arrest warrant had been issued for Benjamin Kirby Blackman for the fatal shooting of Thomas J. Perkins, Assistant Police Chief Terry Sanders said.

“We do have an arrest warrant in the murder,” Sanders said. “We started getting leads and interviewing witnesses that were on the scene when it occurred and developed the suspect that way.”

Sanders said Blackman is from the Fairhope area and was born in 1985, but he did not immediately have any other information available such as a criminal history. More information was planned for release after press time on Tuesday, he said.

At 12:55 a.m. Monday, police officers responded to the scene near a nondescript bar in the 1900 block of Young Street, and “found a large crowd in the area and a victim lying unresponsive in the roadway,” according to a police department press release and media reports.

Perkins, 22, was pronounced dead at the scene by Baldwin County Coroner Stan Vinson, and his body was transferred to the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences for an autopsy, according to police.

For more on this story, see the July 7 edition of the Fairhope Courier.