Demarko Cortez Devan Harris, 30, a Black man from Birmingham, was killed on June 24, 2016, in a case that began not with a report of gunfire or a call about an assault, but with flames. That evening, Birmingham police and firefighters were sent to the 2100 block of Smith Avenue, off Wenonah Road in the West Brownville area, after a car fire was reported around 8:30 p.m.
What first looked like a vehicle blaze turned into something far more grim when, after the fire was put out, officers found the charred remains of a victim lying on the ground outside the burning car.
In the first hours of the investigation, authorities did not publicly identify the victim, and the scene carried the kind of uncertainty that often hangs over cases where fire appears to have been used to destroy evidence. The death was treated as a homicide, and investigators worked to determine who the victim was and what had happened before the fire. Harris was later identified as the man found beside the vehicle, and his death was counted among Birmingham’s homicides for 2016.
The sparse public record suggests a violent death followed by an apparent attempt to erase the trail. The location on Smith Avenue became the center of the inquiry, with police focusing on how Harris ended up next to a burning car rather than inside it, a detail that gave the case an especially haunting edge. Public summaries of the case do not lay out a full narrative of the moments leading up to his death, and the cause of death was not broadly detailed in the available reporting summarized online, but the homicide designation made clear that investigators believed his death was the result of criminal violence.
As for the question of who did it, the case appears to have remained unresolved in the public record. The suspect was listed as unknown, and no arrest was publicly noted in the source material tied to the case. No named suspect, charging announcement, trial, or conviction surfaced in the online sources reviewed. In other words, despite the shocking circumstances of Harris being found dead beside a burning car on a Birmingham street, the trail appears to have gone cold in public view, leaving behind an unsolved killing with no publicly identified offender.
