Campus Alert Archive
UAB

Mass Shooting at Hush Lounge on Magnolia Avenue — UAB Issues B-Alert as Five Points South Bleeds

ALshootingemergency notificationmedium confidence
Confirmed Threat

Just after 11 p.m. CDT on Saturday, September 21, 2024, multiple shooters in a vehicle approached Hush Lounge, a hookah and cigar bar at 2012 Magnolia Avenue South in Birmingham's Five Points South nightlife district, and opened fire on a queue outside. Four people were killed and 17 wounded. Many of the wounded were transported to UAB Hospital, with at least four injuries described as life-threatening. The University of Alabama at Birmingham, whose campus dominates Five Points South, issued a B-Alert directing community members to avoid the area as Birmingham Police Department launched what would become its largest active investigation of 2024.

Alerts
1
Response
—
Killed
4
Injured
17
Institution
University of Alabama at Birmingham
Public R1 · AL
~21,900 studentsRaveB-Alert
Confirmed Timeline

Alert Sequence

1 message in sequence

Some alert texts below are approximate reconstructions from news coverage, not confirmed verbatim transcripts. Reconstructed texts are shown in italic with a dashed border. Verified verbatim texts have a solid border and are marked accordingly.

INITIAL ALERTSMS
Approximate reconstructionReconstruction from UAB B-Alert protocol page and news coverage of the September 21, 2024 incident; UAB has not published the original SMS text in a publicly accessible archive223 chars
UAB B-Alert: Shooting reported in the 2000 block of Magnolia Avenue South in Five Points South. Avoid the area. Multiple law enforcement agencies are responding. UAB Hospital trauma operations are active. Updates to follow.

This text has been reconstructed from news coverage and may not reflect the exact original wording.

Five Points South is geographically interlocked with UAB's main academic and medical campus — the Hill Student Center sits a few blocks from the Hush Lounge — so a Magnolia Avenue mass shooting is a direct B-Alert trigger even though the actual shooting was on public street rather than UAB property
UAB Hospital is the Level I trauma center for the entire Birmingham metro, so a 17-wounded mass shooting generates both a B-Alert (campus safety) and a separate UAB Medicine internal mass-casualty page — students in clinical rotations were paged independently
B-Alert's standard language for off-campus shootings uses 'avoid the area' rather than 'shelter in place' — appropriate here because the shooting was a drive-by hit on a specific lounge rather than a continuing free-roaming threat
Context

Background

The University of Alabama at Birmingham is a public R1 doctoral institution with approximately 21,900 students. Its main campus and medical complex dominate Birmingham's Five Points South neighborhood — a mixed-use district with restaurants, bars, and live music venues clustered along 20th Street South and Magnolia Avenue. On the night of Saturday, September 21, 2024, just after 11 p.m. CDT, multiple shooters arrived in a vehicle at Hush Lounge, a hookah-and-cigar bar at 2012 Magnolia Avenue South, exited, and opened fire on the line of patrons outside. Four people were killed and seventeen wounded — making the incident the deadliest mass shooting in Birmingham of 2024 and one of the deadliest in Alabama history. Many of the wounded were transported to UAB Hospital, the regional Level I trauma center. UAB activated its B-Alert emergency notification system to direct students and employees to avoid the Magnolia Avenue corridor, and concurrently activated an internal mass-casualty page for clinical staff. Investigators later concluded that the shooting was a paid-hit targeted assault — not a random act — with the eventual indictments naming Damien McDaniel, Ny'Quan Lollar, and Crishawn Ja'mel McLemore-Bruce. On the one-year anniversary in 2025, Birmingham media revisited the trauma and UAB community members noted that the violence had reshaped nighttime foot traffic across Five Points South for months.
Analysis

Key Findings

The Five Points South mass shooting is the most consequential off-campus incident to ever trigger a UAB B-Alert — UAB Hospital received the majority of the seventeen wounded as a Level I trauma center, creating a dual notification cascade (campus avoidance + clinical mass-casualty page)
UAB's B-Alert language used 'avoid the area' rather than 'shelter in place' — operationally correct for a drive-by hit, but a meaningful contrast with peer R1 responses that have defaulted to shelter language for off-campus shootings in their patrol zone
The interlocking geography of UAB and Five Points South makes the campus uniquely exposed to nightlife violence — the 2024 shooting and a string of follow-on Five Points incidents led UAB to expand its evening shuttle service and renew its blue-light call-box maintenance
Three separate indictments (McDaniel in October 2024; Lollar and McLemore-Bruce in March 2025) confirmed the shooting was a coordinated paid-hit operation, not a random act — context that mattered for UAB students processing whether the trauma could recur
Outcome
Four killed, seventeen wounded. In October 2024, [22-year-old Damien McDaniel was arrested and charged with capital murder](https://www.birminghamal.gov/news/media-release-235-arrest-made-quadruple-homicide-investigation-mass-shooting). In March 2025, [Ny'Quan Lollar and Crishawn Ja'mel McLemore-Bruce were also charged with capital murder](https://www.bhamwiki.com/w/2024_Five_Points_South_shooting) in connection to the shooting. Investigators concluded the shooters had been paid to commit a targeted hit.
Provenance

Sources

  1. Source
    2024 Birmingham shooting (Wikipedia)
    en.wikipedia.org
  2. Source
    2024 Five Points South shooting (Bhamwiki)
    bhamwiki.com
  3. News
    Birmingham shooting: At least 4 killed and 18 injured in Alabama (NBC News)
    nbcnews.com
  4. Official
    Media Release 235 - Arrest made in the Quadruple Homicide Investigation Mass Shooting (City of Birmingham)
    birminghamal.gov
  5. News
    A closer look at the impact of nightclub shootings in Birmingham (ABC 33/40)
    abc3340.com
  6. News
    One Year Later: Remembering the mass shooting in Birmingham's Five Points South (ABC 33/40)
    abc3340.com
  7. Official
    UAB B-Alert (UAB Emergency Management)
    uab.edu
Tags
shootingmass-shootingoff-campusalabamapublic-r1uabaacfive-points-southhush-loungemagnolia-avenuedrive-bytrauma-centerbirmingham
Added May 2026Updated May 2026Via ingestion