Bausley Shoffner Gwinn-Bowles, a 20-year-old Black/African American man, was killed in a shooting in Dunbar, West Virginia, during the early morning hours of September 7, 2025. Kanawha County sheriff’s deputies were called at about 5 a.m. to assist the Dunbar Police Department with a homicide investigation at a residence in the 400 block of 16th Street. When deputies and detectives arrived, they found Gwinn-Bowles dead from a gunshot wound inside the residence.
Law enforcement identified him as being from Dunbar, although his family obituary described him as a lifelong Charleston resident.
Investigators quickly focused on a juvenile who was also inside the home. According to the Kanawha County Sheriff’s Office account reported by local news organizations, authorities determined that the teenager shot Gwinn-Bowles and then turned the firearm on himself. The juvenile survived the self-inflicted gunshot wound and was transported to CAMC General Hospital in critical condition. Several other juveniles were reportedly inside the residence when the violence occurred, but none of them were injured. Authorities did not publicly identify the suspected shooter by name in the reporting, and investigators had not established publicly what happened immediately before the shooting or what may have motivated it. The case was described by law enforcement as a murder followed by an attempted suicide rather than a shooting involving an unknown assailant who fled the scene.
In the immediate aftermath, investigators continued trying to reconstruct the events inside the house, including the circumstances that led to Gwinn-Bowles being shot and the juvenile subsequently shooting himself. The sheriff’s office specifically reported that no criminal charges had been filed while the investigation was underway. The available public reporting does not document a subsequent arrest, indictment, trial, guilty plea, or conviction connected to Gwinn-Bowles’s death. The last clearly reported case status therefore left the suspected shooter hospitalized and the investigation open, with authorities still working to determine the complete sequence of events and whether criminal charges would follow.
Gwinn-Bowles’s death cut short a life that family members remembered for music, cooking and a close connection to those around him. His obituary said he graduated from Capital High School, where he played trombone, served as one of the drum majors during his senior year and participated in Junior ROTC. He had developed an interest in cooking from an early point in his life and later worked as a cook at The Bucket restaurant, a job the obituary said he loved. Away from work, he enjoyed video games and playing the piano and was remembered for his smile, playful personality and habit of facing life in his cowboy hat and boots. His family also described particularly close relationships with his siblings, including his older brother Taylor and younger sister Bonner. A memorial service was held on September 18, 2025, at Pilgrim Home Missionary Church in St. Albans, leaving his family and friends to mourn a death that investigators attributed to a shooting inside a Dunbar home whose full circumstances were still being examined when the case was publicly reported.
