TW: description of violent death
One of our greatest hopes with our “Unfinished Stories” series is that, over time, we may actually get to tell you their endings.
While we’re not there yet with either of our previous subjects, the family of Keith Warren has at least taken a large step towards closure in his mysterious death.
Last year, we got to tell the story of Keith Waddell Warren, a passionate, loving, and trustworthy young man with a bright future ahead of him. He was a son to a proud mother Mary Couey, and a protective big brother to his sister Sherri. Keith loved being in nature and spending time with animals. He played sports like basketball and tennis, which his sister Sherri says he played in a unique way: “He used to play in these ugly-ass brown construction boots”. Keith was also a contemplative person, who enjoyed time to himself.
While Keith deserves to be highlighted for his passion for life and kindness towards others, it is his death which garners the most attention.
On July 31, 1986, Keith was found hanging from a tree near his home in Silver Spring, MD. The Montgomery County Police rushed to rule Keith’s death a suicide on-site, mostly based on a comment made by a bystander at the scene. They immediately sent Keith’s body to Collins Funeral Home to be embalmed, all before his mother even knew he was dead.
For six years, Keith’s family accepted the ruling of suicide, despite their mistrust of the findings.
That changed in 1992 on what would have been Keith’s 25th birthday, when official photographs of his death scene were left anonymously on his mother’s doorstep.
While the police acknowledged to the Warren family’s private investigator that the photos are theirs, they have no idea how they ended up on Mary Couey’s doorstep.
The photos revealed shocking discrepancies and procedural failings in the police’s investigation: the clothes that Keith left home in are not the same as those on his body in the photos; while his signature brown boots were returned to his family, he was not wearing them when his body was found; and perhaps most confounding of all, his feet are touching the ground, stretched out in front of him, the small tree bending over and unable to support the weight.
That’s only the tip of the iceberg.
This set Keith’s family on a path to truth that they continue to travel today. Many community organizations stepped in to help them financially and emotionally. In 1994, Keith’s family and community raised enough money to have his body exhumed and an autopsy performed. Pathologist Dr. Isidore Mihalakis performed the autopsy, and did not find a medical basis for the finding of suicide.
Keith’s mother Mary spent the rest of her life fighting for the truth in her son’s case. She started letter writing campaigns, published pamphlets, contacted every county and state official there was to contact, and even shared Keith’s story on Unsolved Mysteries multiple times.
After Mary passed away in 2009, Keith’s sister Sherri immediately stepped up and worked just as tirelessly.
Now, almost 40 years after Keith’s death, Sherri and her community have accomplished one of her mother’s goals. In March 2024, Sherri received word that there was nothing in any of Keith’s reports to medically support a finding of suicide. As such, the Office of the Medical Examiner of Maryland is going to officially reclassify Keith’s manner of death to ”Undetermined”.
This is a rare occurrence, not only in Maryland but across the nation. It takes years of advocacy and hard work to make a reclassification happen. So far as we known, Sherri has been only the second person in Maryland to accomplish this. The only other person we know of is Rev. Marguerite Morris in the case of her daughter Kathy (our very first subject of Unfinished Stories).
This rarity is not the fault of the advocates, but of the rigid government structures that make it too easy for justice to transform from delayed to denied.
The war for justice for Keith is not over; but this battle, mercifully, has been won. Next steps will include approaching Montgomery County with the Medical Examiner’s findings.
See Sherri’s announcement of the decision on her Instagram to learn more about the decision, and read our interview with Sherri here.