Misty Dawn Davis-Beasley, a 42-year-old White woman, was found dead along the shoulder of the 6300 block of 5th Avenue South in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 1, 2021. The place where she was discovered sat out in the open, a stretch of roadway that people pass every day, yet what had happened to her was anything but ordinary. The Jefferson County Coroner/Medical Examiner’s Office identified her after the fact, and the circumstances left officials treating her death as more than an unexplained tragedy—something that demanded answers.
In the days that followed, a different kind of urgency took over—one that wasn’t only about how she died, but about who would be told. Investigators and the coroner’s office struggled to locate relatives or close friends, despite indications that she had connections in the area, including a home address in Bessemer for several years and ties to an address in Tarrant. The search for her family was complicated further by the fact that she had two young children in the Birmingham area, and authorities said they could not determine who was caring for them. Public appeals were made for anyone who knew her family to come forward, as officials tried to piece together the basic human details that usually surround a death: next-of-kin, a support network, someone to confirm the story of a life that ended abruptly.
As the case moved from discovery to investigation, public information remained thin. By October 2021, her death was being reported as under investigation as a homicide, but no suspect or suspects were announced and no arrest was reported in connection with her death. The story, as presented to the public, became one of a woman found on a roadside and a city’s investigators working behind the scenes while releasing little about what they believed happened, what evidence they had, or whether they had narrowed in on anyone.
