A man is in custody after a U.S. Army veteran from Alabama and his wife were brutally murdered in their own home.
Justin Elrod, 43, and his wife, Lena Elrod, 42, were found dead July 12 inside their home on Langdon Woods Road in Reform, Ala. Deputies and officers from several area departments first responded to a reported burglary in progress on another road shortly after midnight, according to the Pickens County Sheriff’s Office.
“He was a very humble guy, and he was the last person I think that something like this would happen to,” Aliceville, Ala., Mayor Terrence Windham told local WBRC following the killings. “He survived the military, survived working in the prison, and now, this situation, it just makes it even worse.”
Court documents cited by local media outlets allege that George Birmingham, 46, killed Justin by striking or stabbing him around the head and body, using a metallic object or another inanimate object. Lena was killed after being beaten in the head with either an electric reciprocating saw or some other inanimate object.
Investigators described the suspect as an acquaintance of the couple, but have not yet established a motive.
Annabelle Lovelady, the daughter of Lena and stepdaughter of Justin, told ABC 33/40 that the couple “were both really amazing people” and would do anything for anyone.
She also claimed that Birmingham knew the family.
“They were actually best friends with my mother. My mother ran a cleaning business with his wife and the man who did it was actually best friends with my mom’s husband for years,” Lovelady said.
Birmingham was formally charged on July 13 with capital murder, two counts of murder, second-degree burglary, drug possession and resisting arrest. He is being held without bond on the capital murder charge.
Pickens County Sheriff’s Office said the investigation remains ongoing, with additional charges possible. Birmingham has a preliminary hearing scheduled for August.
In its public statement announcing the charges, the sheriff’s office asked the community to keep not only the victims’ families in their minds but “the responding first responders,” referencing the gruesome nature of what was discovered at the crime scene.
Reform, Gordo and Carrollton police and investigators with the 24th Judicial Circuit District Attorney’s Office all took part in the response.
An Army MP, Then a Corrections Officer
Justin William Elrod was born in Tuscaloosa in 1983.
He served in the United States Army as a military police officer and was deployed to both Afghanistan and Iraq, according to his obituary. Military police in such theaters could be found running convoys, guarding detainees, or training local forces. Often they would patrol some of the most dangerous ground of either conflict.
When he came home, he did not leave that line of work behind. He became a federal corrections officer at FCI Aliceville in Alabama. His obituary lists, among his survivors, his “special BOP family”—the fellow Bureau of Prisons employees who stood alongside him on the job.
One of them was Jason Burns, who reportedly worked as Elrod’s partner at the prison.
In the days after the killings, Burns told WBRC that reality kept ambushing him. He had to keep reminding himself the couple was gone “about every five minutes.”
Mayor Windham described Elrod the way neighbors and coworkers tend to describe the steady ones: hardworking, fair, someone who never raised his voice.
Justin and Lena Elrod are to be buried together on Saturday, July 25, at Ethelsville Baptist Church Cemetery following a service in Reform, Ala.
Rather than sending flowers, the Elrod family instead requested that all memorials and donations be sent to the Wounded Warrior Project.
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