18-year-old Alabama cheerleader Kimber Mills was shot in the head at a bonfire; suspect Steven Tyler Whitehead, 27, has been identified.
Kimber Mills, an 18-year-old cheerleader at Cleveland High School in Cleveland, Alabama, was shot in the head at a bonfire event in a wooded hangout spot in the town on Sunday. While she remains critical at the hospital, with her family planning to take of life support, the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday identified the suspect as 27-year-old Steven Tyler Whitehead.
The Sheriff’s office announced that Whitehead now faces three counts of attempted murder charges for shooting Mills and three other victims: “a 21-year-old male and an 18-year-old male,” as well as a 20-year-old female, per the police. He is lodged at the Jefferson County Jail, and his bond has been set at $180,000.
As of now, he has only been charged with attempted murder. However, once Kimber Mills is taken off life support, the charges will likely be upgraded to murder.
According to reports, Whitehead stormed the wooded bonfire area located on the 900 block of Highway 75 North in Pinson. Per the New York Post, locals refer to the spot as ‘The Pit.’
Police said that Whitehead stormed into the area at around midnight on Sunday and shot four people. While police rescued three of the victims, the 20-year-old female had already been taken to the hospital.
Kimber Mills Health Update: Latest On Her Condition
Kimber Mills was undergoing treatment at the University of Alabama Hospital and has been placed on life support. On Tuesday, her family announced that they have decided to take her off life support as her condition has not shown any improvement.
Family members announced on social media that Kimber Mills will have her Honor Walk – transportation from life support to the organ donation center at 5 p.m. on Tuesday. After that, she will go to surgery for organ donation.
“She is giving the greatest gift of all today – life,” Morgan Metz, one of Mills’ cousins, posted on Facebook. “She was a blessing and now she gets to bless others.”
As the clock ticked toward midnight on the night that would forever scar Pinson, Alabama, 18-year-old Kimber Mills leaned close to her best friend amid the crackling bonfire and thumping bass, her voice dropping to a hushed urgency: “I keep hearing it again.” The words, dismissed in the moment as jitters from the rowdy crowd or a trick of the wind through the pines, hung like an unspoken omen. It wasn’t until days later, in the quiet devastation of grief, that the friend – a 17-year-old Cleveland High School junior speaking out for the first time – replayed a shaky cellphone video from “The Pit.” There it was: the same inexplicable sound, captured twice in the footage, echoing the dread in Mills’ whisper. Now, as Jefferson County investigators seize the clip for forensic audio analysis, this spectral “it” emerges as the latest thread in a tapestry of clues – from a 14-second deathbed call to a mysteriously relocated silver pendant – threatening to rewrite the narrative of the bonfire massacre that claimed Mills’ life.
The whisper, shared around 11:58 PM on October 18, came during a brief lull in the line-dancing frenzy that defined the gathering. “The Pit,” that infamous wooded crater off Highway 75 – a magnet for Jefferson County’s restless youth, blending high schoolers with sketchy twenty-somethings under the guise of bonfires and country jams – pulsed with life. String lights dangled from low branches, casting flickering shadows on faces flushed from cheap beer and laughter. Mills, the effervescent cheer captain in her pink crop top, had been the spark: twirling friends into formations, her silver pendant glinting like a talisman against her collarbone. But as the playlist looped into a slower track, she pulled her friend aside, eyes darting toward the treeline. “She was fidgety, you know? Said she’d heard ‘it’ earlier that night, around 10:30 or so, and now it was back,” the friend, identified only as “Taylor L.” in a tearful interview with WVTM 13, recalled. “I thought she meant the music cutting out or some animal rustling. We joked about it – ‘Ghosts in the woods?’ – but her face… it was scared. Real scared.”
Taylor’s revelation, corroborated by a second witness who overheard the exchange while passing a lukewarm seltzer, slots into a timeline now scrutinized under electron microscopes and spectrographs. Just three minutes after the whisper – at 12:01 AM – Mills was seen on that same log, absently toying with her grandmother’s heirloom pendant, its heart-shaped locket catching the fire’s glow. By 12:04 AM, she melted into the shadows for her fateful 14-second call, the one ending in a decelerated murmur of terror that has detectives debating transcripts late into the night. And at 12:24 AM, uninvited interloper Steven Tyler Whitehead, 27, allegedly ignited the powder keg: approaching a cluster of girls with slurred aggression, sparking a melee that ended in four shots from his .38 revolver. Mills, uninvolved yet heroic, lunged to shield a friend – or so survivor accounts suggest – taking bullets to the leg and head. She lingered until October 22, her “honor walk” at UAB Hospital a procession of 200 mourners, before her organs breathed new life into recipients, including a toddler in Atlanta.
The video – a 22-second TikTok-style clip Taylor shot at 11:55 PM, now viral with 1.2 million views after an anonymous leak to Reddit’s r/Birmingham – captures the innocence teetering on abyss. Revelers stomp in sync to a Luke Bryan remix, Mills front and center, her pink blur a beacon of joy. But at 0:07 and again at 0:19, there’s the sound: a low, metallic thunk – not the pop of fireworks or snap of branches, but something sharper, closer, like a car door slamming in the distance or a suppressed click from the underbrush. “I replayed it on my laptop, volume cranked, and froze,” Taylor told investigators, her statement filed October 31. “It was that – the thing Kimber meant. Twice, like it was stalking us. Why didn’t I hear it then?” Audio experts, looped in by the sheriff’s office, describe it as a “mid-frequency impulse,” possibly a weapon racking, a vehicle idling, or – in the darkest theories – a deliberate warning shot into the dirt.
This auditory ghost has electrified the probe, already a pressure cooker of conflicting testimonies and physical oddities. Whitehead, the ex-National Guard marksman jailed on $2 million bond for capital murder and three attempted murders, insists he fired only after being “swarmed” by partygoers, including Silas McCay, the 21-year-old now facing hindering charges for allegedly spiriting him away post-shooting. But the sound predates the confrontation by over an hour – was Whitehead casing the Pit earlier, his .38 barking a muffled test? Or does it implicate McCay and his cohort Hunter McCulloch, arrested last week for assault in the prelude brawl, their Change.org defense petition swelling to 7,000 signatures amid whispers of vigilante justice? The silver pendant, found pristine on Mills’ log at 4 AM – clasp open, no fingerprints but hers – now pairs hauntingly with this audio: Did “it” spook her into clutching the locket? Was the whisper her first SOS, the call her last?
Forensic acousticians at Auburn University, consulted pro bono, pored over the video using spectral analysis software. “At standard speed, it’s ambient noise – fire pops, laughter bleed. Slowed to 25%, the waveform spikes: a distinct 1.2 kHz tone, decaying over 0.8 seconds, consistent with mechanical action at 50-100 meters,” Dr. Marcus Hale explained to AL.com, declining to speculate on source. “Replay it with noise cancellation; it’s unnerving. Like eavesdropping on fate.” The clip’s metadata geolocates to The Pit’s GPS coordinates, timestamp irrefutable via EXIF data. No visual anomaly – just silhouettes against flames – but the sound’s duality suggests repetition, intent. Social media erupts: TikTok duets layer the audio over Mills’ honor walk footage, #HearItAgain trending with 45,000 posts; X threads dissect waveforms, one user overlaying it against Whitehead’s intake video, spotting a faint echo in his nervous cough.
Taylor’s confession carries the weight of survivor’s remorse. “I should’ve grabbed her, dragged her to my truck,” she wept during a candlelit vigil at Cleveland High, where grief counselors fielded 150 sessions this week. Mills’ family, pillars of poise amid pulverizing loss, embraces the lead. Her mother, in a Facebook Live from the memorial site – a silver heart etched log replica under Pinson’s oaks – said, “Kimber heard the devil coming. That sound? It’s her fighting back from heaven, telling us to listen.” GoFundMe coffers hit $300,000, earmarked for a “Pit Safety Fund” pushing for drone patrols and teen curfews. Sister Ashley, who live-tweeted the organ procurement, added: “She whispered truth. Now the world’s hearing it too.”
Whitehead’s arraignment, set for November 12, looms larger. His public defender, poring over discovery, decries “manufactured spooks” in a motion to suppress the audio as “prejudicial hearsay.” Yet the three wounded – including the 21-year-old “hero” shot nine times mid-shield – corroborate from hospital beds: “Heard somethin’ off before the yelling started. Like a ghost gun.” McCay, out on $50,000 bail, posts cryptic IG stories: a Pit bonfire emoji doused in rain. Conspiracy corners of 4chan posit a third party – a dealer lurking, or rival crew – but evidence leans toward Whitehead’s solo rage, amplified by alcohol and “disrespect.”
“The Pit” reckoning accelerates: State reps table HB-478, mandating landowner liability for unpermitted gatherings; Cleveland installs AI audio monitors in parking lots, scanning for anomalies. Echoes of Delphi’s “bridge guy” recording haunt experts – will Mills’ “it” yield a voiceprint match? As November fog rolls through the woods, Taylor replays the video nightly, earbuds in, chasing closure. “She heard it twice. We all did, and ignored it. Not anymore.”
In Kimber’s shadow, that whisper – and its doubled echo – demands volume. Not just for justice, but prevention: a clarion that in the fire’s roar, danger whispers first. For the girl who danced till doom, “hearing it again” was prophecy fulfilled. Investigators listen now, and the truth, once faint, grows louder.
