Phi Anh Le, a 40-year-old Asian woman from Summersville, West Virginia, died on the evening of July 28, 2022, in a shooting at Jo’s Nails & Spa in the Merchant Walk shopping center. Online obituary information identified her as Phi Anh Le, born in Vietnam on March 3, 1982, the daughter of Rat Nguyen and Chi Nguyen. She was remembered as part of a family that included her children, Alexa Le and Alex Le, and siblings Trang Nguyen, Triet Nguyen and Luong Nguyen.
The violence unfolded
around 6:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening inside the nail salon, a place where people would normally have expected routine conversations, appointments and the quiet rhythm of a small business. Authorities said the gunman was Patrick Wayne Cater, 52, who had a connection to the salon. Reports identified him as someone who had worked there, and West Virginia State Police later described the situation as involving business partners, saying the male victim, Khuyen Van Le, and Cater were co-lease owners of the business.
According to police accounts reported after the shooting, Cater entered or returned to Jo’s Nails & Spa armed with a semiautomatic pistol and opened fire. Phi Anh Le and Khuyen Van Le, 45, were both fatally shot inside the salon and were pronounced dead at the scene. The shooting shook Summersville, and people nearby described the sudden sound of gunfire forcing workers and customers in neighboring businesses to take cover as the active-shooter call brought police rushing to the shopping center.
When Summersville officers arrived, they encountered Cater still armed. Police said officers shot him at the scene. He was taken to a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Because Cater died after being shot by police, there were no criminal arrests, trial proceedings or convictions connected to the killings of Phi Anh Le and Khuyen Van Le. Publicly available reporting identifies Cater as the suspect and gunman, and the official accounts described the incident as a fatal shooting followed by an officer-involved shooting that ended the immediate threat.
The case left three people dead in all: Phi Anh Le, Khuyen Van Le and Patrick Wayne Cater. Investigators pointed to the business connection between Cater and Khuyen Van Le as the known link between the shooter and the victims, but available reports did not provide a detailed public motive beyond that relationship to the salon. What began as an ordinary evening at a Summersville nail salon ended in a sudden act of violence that took the lives of a married couple remembered by family and community, and left the town trying to understand how such a tragedy happened in a familiar local business.
