Adam Blake Warren, a 36-year-old white man from the Birmingham area, was discovered on the morning of December 26, 2019, near Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport. Airport personnel came upon him around 10 a.m. along the roadside in the 8900 block of 8th Court North, a stretch close enough to the airport to feel busy and exposed, yet tucked into a gritty edge of the city where a person could still be left unseen.
When Birmingham police and fire-rescue responded, he was found unresponsive and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Early reports carried an unsettled, uncertain tone—officers initially did not publicly describe a clear cause of death, and the case shifted as the Jefferson County Coroner’s Office and investigators worked through what the scene was telling them. What began as a suspicious discovery hardened into something more definitive when the death was ruled a homicide, turning the place where he was found into an active crime scene and pushing detectives to reconstruct the final hours that ended on that roadside. In the days that followed, police acknowledged the broader context of a violent end-of-year stretch in Birmingham, with multiple homicides under investigation and no immediate arrests announced at that time.
As the weeks moved into the new year, the silence around suspects did not hold. Public case summaries later reported that Cortney Lamar Copes was arrested in January 2020 and charged with murder in connection with Warren’s death, marking the first named suspect tied to the killing. Beyond that charging milestone, publicly available reporting accessible without paid court-record systems does not consistently document a full account of what evidence led investigators to Copes, nor does it reliably show later stages such as indictment details, a trial date, or a conviction in this case. What can be traced from publicly posted summaries is the arc from discovery, to homicide ruling, to a murder charge that placed the case into the slow, procedural machinery of the courts.
