Ny’Asia Nicole Culbertson, an 11-year-old Black / African American female, died on December 6, 2023, after a shooting at a home on Ceres Hollow Road near Bluefield, West Virginia. What began as an emergency call about a man holding several people at gunpoint quickly became a devastating scene for Mercer County authorities, first responders, and the family members who arrived as police taped off the road and investigators worked into the evening.
West Virginia State Police said troopers
from the Princeton Detachment were dispatched by Mercer 911 at about 2:56 p.m. to the residence. When they arrived minutes later, they found a man and a woman outside or near the scene suffering from gunshot wounds to the head and body. Troopers entered the home and found Ny’Asia dead from a gunshot wound, along with a man who was also deceased from a gunshot wound.
Investigators identified the deceased man as Kenneth Smith and determined that he was the shooter. Authorities reported that Smith died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, making the case a murder-suicide rather than one that led to an arrest. Because Smith died at the scene, there were no criminal charges, trial, or conviction tied to Ny’Asia’s death. The two wounded adults were given medical care at the scene, taken first to WVU Medicine Princeton Community Hospital, and later transferred to Roanoke Memorial Hospital in critical condition.
Reports described the shooting as connected to a domestic dispute. Smith was reported to have gone to the home looking for a former girlfriend, and when she was not there, the violence fell on the people inside the residence. In the chaos, another child, a 9-year-old girl, reportedly escaped through a side door. The attack left two people dead, two people critically wounded, and a family and community struggling to understand how a child’s life could be taken in a dispute that should never have reached her.
Ny’Asia was a fifth-grade student at Mountain Valley Elementary School. After the shooting, Mercer County Schools made counselors and staff available to students and employees as classmates and teachers learned that one of their own had been killed. School officials asked the community to keep Ny’Asia’s family, friends, school staff, and students in their thoughts, and the tragedy deeply affected the surrounding Bluefield and Princeton area.
Outside the police reports, Ny’Asia was remembered as a bright, loving child with a big smile and a joyful spirit. Her family described her as smart, funny, caring, and full of promise. She loved music, dancing, singing, church camp, time with family, and her sisters, and she had been baptized at Princeton Advent Christian Church about a month before her death. She was looking forward to the ordinary milestones of childhood and growing up, including school trips, middle school, cheerleading, dances, proms, and graduation.
Her death was not the result of an unknown suspect or an unresolved search for an offender. Authorities named Kenneth Smith as the shooter, said he killed himself at the scene, and continued the investigation through West Virginia State Police and crime scene personnel. For Ny’Asia’s family, the official finding did not lessen the loss: a child who had only just begun building her future was taken in a sudden act of gun violence, leaving behind grieving relatives, classmates, teachers, church members, and a community shaken by what happened inside that Ceres Hollow Road home.
