Who murdered 23 year old Derek Washington? Derek DeWayne Washington, a 23-year-old Black man, vanished from Birmingham, Alabama on April 3, 2015, leaving behind a sudden silence that his family tried to fill with flyers, phone calls, and pleas for anyone who might have seen him in the Wylam area. For months, hope and frustration lived side by side as tips came in but led nowhere, and the days he’d been missing began to outnumber the memories of his last confirmed sighting.
Nearly two years later, on January 29, 2017, the uncertainty ended in the woods of western Jefferson County. A man squirrel-hunting in the Booker Heights community stumbled onto what looked like human skeletal remains in a densely overgrown area near a vacant house. He retreated from the brush, went home, and called authorities, who were then guided back to the scene—near Shady Grove Road and close to the 5300 block of Wood Avenue—where investigators confirmed the remains were human and began documenting and collecting evidence.
As the recovery unfolded, detectives described the body as likely having been at that location for months, and officials did not publicly release a cause of death. The Jefferson County Coroner’s Office later identified the remains as Washington, and investigators treated the case as a homicide, with the matter ultimately turned over to Birmingham police because authorities believed the killing occurred within their jurisdiction. The grim discovery, the long gap between his disappearance and the recovery, and the absence of public answers hardened the story into something heavier than a missing-persons case—an open murder investigation with a name finally returned to it.
In the years since that identification, public statements from law enforcement sources tied to the discovery have emphasized requests for community information rather than announcing a breakthrough. In the materials describing the discovery and early investigation, no suspect was publicly identified and no arrest was announced in connection with Washington’s death; instead, investigators continued to ask anyone with knowledge of what happened to come forward.
