A man charged with kidnapping a woman from her Avondale apartment and stuffing her in the trunk of her car in 2017 has been found guilty on all charges.
Manuel Ali Towns, 29, was charged with first-degree kidnapping, first-degree robbery, and two counts of fraudulent use of a credit or debit card. His trial began Tuesday morning in Jefferson County Circuit Judge Teresa Pulliam's courtroom. The jury began deliberations Wednesday afternoon and came back with the guilty verdict on all counts this morning.
The sentencing for Towns will be next month, but he faces mandatory life without parole because of his previous felony convictions.
The incident happened the night of March 14, 2017, when 25-year-old Brittney Diggs was taken at gunpoint outside of her apartment on 4th Avenue South and 38th Street South in Birmingham's Avondale neighborhood. At some point during the abduction, Diggs was stuffed into the trunk of her Nissan Altima. She jumped out of the trunk and escaped into a gas station on Bessemer Road after the suspect had stopped and tried to pull out money using Diggs' debit card.
The Birmingham police Crime Reduction Team arrested Towns about a week after the crime.
Jefferson County Deputy District Attorneys Carlos Gonzalez and Ellie Friedman argued that Towns was the abductor and man who stuffed Diggs in the trunk; Assistant Public Defenders William Porter and Melina Mizel-Goldfarb argued that the case was one of mistaken identity, and Towns was not the person who originally kidnapped Diggs and forced her into the trunk.
Diggs, 25, took the stand Tuesday and testified about the ordeal, saying she told paramedics on the night of the incident that Towns said he would rape her using explicit language of exactly what he planned to do to her. She said she did not tell the male Birmingham police detective on her case about Towns' exact language, but she did tell a female deputy district attorney later after asking the male deputy DA to leave the room.