David Robinson was a 24-year-old Black man from Birmingham, Alabama, whose story unfolded in fragments, first as a missing-person case and then as a homicide investigation. According to reporting from Birmingham-area outlets, his family filed a missing-person report on April 29, 2012. For months, there was no public answer about what had happened to him. Then, late on June 26, 2012, Birmingham police were called to a wooded area in the 1500 block of James Street in Dolomite, where skeletal remains were found just off the roadway. At that point, investigators could not even determine basic identifying details from the condition of the remains, and the death was not yet publicly tied to Robinson.
The case took on a much darker shape after the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office examined the remains. Authorities later concluded that the death was a homicide and that Robinson had suffered a gunshot wound. More than a year after the remains were discovered, police publicly identified the victim as David Robinson in November 2013. What had begun as a disappearance was now confirmed as a killing, one that had left his family without answers through a long stretch of uncertainty. The public record available through those reports does not clearly establish a precise date of death, only that he was reported missing in April 2012 and his remains were found on June 26, 2012.
As for suspects and arrests, the reporting is starkly limited. Police said at the time that they believed the shooter remained at large, and one contemporaneous report stated plainly that there had been no arrests made in the case. I did not find a credible online source showing that anyone was later arrested, charged, tried, or convicted in Robinson’s death. Based on the publicly available coverage I found, no suspect was publicly identified by name in those reports, and the homicide appears to have remained unresolved in the sources available online.
