By Sarah Whites-Koditschek
On New Year’s Day 2022, Alexis Garth posted a photo with boyfriend Ky’ruan Yarbrough on Facebook in front of their new home in Athens.
Exactly one year later, New Year’s Day 2023, Garth was found bleeding to death in the driveway of that home after police and family say Yarbrough shot her multiple times during a domestic dispute.
“She was excited to move into a bigger house for her and her kids,’’ Garth’s sister, Miracle Scott, said in an interview with AL.com. “She didn’t think it would be the place she died too.”
Garth, a 26-year-old mother of two daughters – ages 3 years old and 8 months old – died Sunday morning after her family said she was shot five times while trying to shield her 3-year-old, who hid under a car in the driveway of the family’s home on Oakdale Ridge Lane, family and police said.
Yarbrough, 20, is charged with capital murder.
Charging documents against him state the charge is capital because Garth was killed in front of her 3-year-old daughter.
A Limestone County judge on Tuesday ordered Yarbrough be held without bond. That ruling noted that Yarbrough was convicted in 2019, at the age of 16, of another crime.
The News Courier reported that year that Yarbrough was charged in the shooting of three other juveniles.
For the 2019 conviction, he received a 36-month suspended sentence and put on probation for 24 months.
His probation was later revoked, sometime after the picture of him and Garth was posted online in January 2022, and he was ordered to serve time in state prison.
According to District Judge Gray West’s order, Yarbrough was granted mandatory release on Dec. 2, 2022, even though his end of sentence was not set to be completed until May 2023.
He was allowed to return home, where Garth was fatally shot less than one month later.
Family said the deadly shooting happened as Garth was trying to leave the abusive relationship.
In a Facebook Live video, Alexis Garth’s mother, Shunetta Garth, chronicled the hours leading up to her daughter’s death. The video was posted in response to people seemingly defending Yarbrough on social media.
According to her mother, Garth had visited her at her home on New Year’s 2023 and then went to Huntsville to be with friends. When Garth returned from Huntsville to her mother’s house, Yarbrough showed up to drive her back to their home.
A short time later, several family members went to Buc-ee’s and Garth’s sister noticed she had left her keys in Garth’s car. Garth met her sister at the store and returned her keys and then went back home.
Scott said her sister called her a short time later and asked her to come get the child.
“She was crying and asking him to get away from her with the gun,” Scott said. “And then I called her back and that’s when I heard it.”
Shunetta Garth said Yarbrough could be heard through the open line saying, “I’m going to kill her (the baby), kill you and kill myself,’’ she said on the live video. That’s when she called 911 and headed toward her daughter’s home.
Shunetta Garth said when she first got on the scene, she saw both her daughter and Yarbrough laying in the driveway and assumed both were being detained while the domestic dispute was being investigated.
She was demanding to get her granddaughter – the 3-year-old – when she heard an officer ask for a medic bag.
“That’s when the realization kicked in that my daughter wasn’t laying there because she was in a domestic,’’ Shunetta Garth said. “My daughter was laying there with blood running down the sidewalk like water when you wash a car.”
“The reason my granddaughter was in front of that car – she was smart enough to go hide under a car,’’ she said in the video. “My daughter died protecting her daughter. He shot my daughter five times.”
“The officer told me when they were pulling up, he shot her,’’ she said. “He laid himself on the ground, pushed the gun over and said he surrendered.”
Garth was pronounced dead a short time later Huntsville Hospital.
Scott said her sister was trying break things off with Yarbrough. They had been in a relationship for a little over a year, she said, and it had become abusive.
“We didn’t think it would get to this point no, because she had plans to leave in the next few weeks,’’ Scott said. “She tried to leave him, and he wouldn’t let her.”
Scott described her sister as a family-oriented person who was a great friend to others and loved her daughters.
“She would do anything for them,’’ she said.
Garth’s death has devastated the family.
“We’re just taking it day by day,’’ she said.
“We just plan to get justice for her,’’ Scott said, “and get the word out to as many people as we can so this doesn’t happen to anyone else.”
