On the day of the shooting, Prichard, Alabama, already had a garbage emergency. Carts were overflowing across the city. The Alabama Municipal Insurance Corporation had canceled Prichard’s coverage, and the company that leased the city its garbage trucks had demanded them back. At a council committee meeting days earlier, Mayor Carletta Davis said the city had one employee left to drive a garbage truck, plus his supervisor.
Shortly before 2 p.m. on Aug. 4, a Prichard city garbage truck was on Jarrett Road in the Eight Mile community. By that evening, the Mobile County Sheriff’s Office said the man driving it had pointed a gun at another motorist and exchanged gunfire with a car carrying three children. The office also said he had a revoked license and an outstanding domestic violence warrant.
That driver, Clifton Eugene DuBose Jr., 54, has since died. A sheriff’s office spokesperson said he died in the hospital of complications from the gunshot wound he suffered that afternoon. His death was made public on Oct. 13.
What deputies say happened on Jarrett Road
According to the sheriff’s office, the other vehicle was a Honda carrying two adults and three children. The family told deputies they felt the garbage truck was trying to force them off the road near Jarrett Road and Dossett Lane. Sheriff’s Lt. Clark Bolton said the Honda had passed the truck, the two drivers argued, and both vehicles stopped.
Sheriff Paul Burch described what happened next to reporters that night. DuBose got out of the truck and “pointed a gun at the back of the male” driver as the man walked back toward his car. The woman in the Honda then got out and fired two shots, and one hit DuBose in the abdomen. Investigators say DuBose fired into the family’s car. A sheriff’s detective estimated that close to a dozen shots were fired in all.
No one in the Honda was hit. Investigators said one of the children, a preteen, got a small cut from broken glass, and the car’s rear windshield was damaged.
Even with a bullet wound, DuBose got back into the garbage truck and drove it away. He stopped at a gas station at Lott Road and University Boulevard. The store’s manager told WALA-TV that he walked inside and called 911.
The account changed three times in one afternoon
The official account shifted as the day went on, according to updates the sheriff’s office gave WKRG-TV.
- At about 3:30 p.m., officials said the sanitation worker had been shot at by several people and had fired back.
- By about 4:50 p.m., detectives said they did not know who fired first.
- By about 8:50 p.m., Burch had named DuBose and called him the aggressor.
Earlier that afternoon, before DuBose was named, Davis had released a statement. She said the city was praying for the employee’s “full and speedy recovery.”
Deputies also worked a third scene. A car that had nothing to do with the confrontation had a window shot out, and it ended up at a nearby event hall. Public statements so far do not say whose shot hit it.
The license question
For the city, the most uncomfortable part of the sheriff’s account was not the gunfire. It was the paperwork.
The sheriff’s office said DuBose had been driving the city’s truck on a suspended or revoked license. In a later account reported by WALA, Burch described the license as expired. He said it was unclear how a city employee ended up driving a garbage truck without a valid license, and that it “wouldn’t happen with the county or the city of Mobile.”
It is not a small issue. A full-size refuse truck typically weighs well over 26,000 pounds, which is the point at which federal rules require the driver to hold a commercial driver’s license. The city of Prichard has not publicly explained how DuBose came to be driving the truck.
The charges, and why they will not go anywhere
Burch said DuBose would face five counts of shooting into an occupied vehicle. WKRG also reported five counts of reckless endangerment. On top of that, he had an outstanding domestic violence warrant, which came out of Chickasaw and was issued in November 2025, according to the sheriff. Deputies said he would be booked into Mobile County Metro Jail once he left the hospital.
None of those allegations were ever tested in court, and now they will not be. The sheriff’s office has not announced charges against anyone in the Honda.
Accounts of how long DuBose was hospitalized differ. Some reports said he spent more than two months there. WKRG quoted deputies as saying he “recently went to the hospital” and died after his condition got worse. The sheriff’s office has not released an exact date or cause of death.
Meanwhile, the trash
Two days after the shooting, the Prichard City Council approved a 90-day emergency contract with A-1 McDuffie Sanitation to collect the city’s residential garbage. The cost was about $14.25 per home, or $123,775 a month. Davis said the shooting left the city with two garbage truck drivers, which does not match her earlier count of one driver plus a supervisor.
Not everyone on the council agreed with outsourcing. Councilwoman Stephani Johnson-Norwood called the situation “a manufactured emergency.” She wanted the city’s two idle trucks repaired before handing the work to a contractor. A third city truck had been sitting at a Mobile repair shop for 15 months, according to WALA’s reporting.
The contractor began pickups on Aug. 8. The city asked residents to leave their carts at the curb until they were emptied, even if their usual pickup day had passed.
After the shooting, Burch’s advice to drivers was simple: “Don’t get into a confrontation.” Prichard’s emergency garbage contract runs into early November. As of the August vote, the mayor and council had not agreed on whether the city should go back to collecting its own trash. If your city’s garbage trucks were being repossessed, would you outsource the route or fix what you have first?