Curtis Orlando Artis, a 29-year-old Black / African American male from Huntington, was shot and killed on the night of December 8, 2021, in Williamson, West Virginia. The shooting happened around 9:00 p.m. in the East Fourth Avenue area of Williamson, a community in Mingo County. When authorities arrived and began piecing together what had happened, Artis was found deceased at the scene, his life taken before he could be transported for help.
West Virginia State Police later identified
Artis as the man who had been killed, reportedly using fingerprints to confirm his identity. Early reports did not immediately provide a suspect or explain what led to the shooting, leaving only the grim outline of a young man shot to death late on a Wednesday night in a small West Virginia city. The public information released at the time did not describe a confrontation, argument, or motive, and authorities did not share details about whether Artis and the shooter knew one another.
Within a short time, investigators with the Williamson detachment of the West Virginia State Police announced an arrest. Pierre Antonellio Taylor, 48, of Williamson, was identified as the suspect accused of shooting Artis. Taylor was arrested without incident and charged with murder. After his arrest, he was held at the Southwestern Regional Jail while awaiting arraignment.
Publicly available reports described the case as a deadly shooting investigation that quickly became a murder charge once investigators determined who they believed was responsible. The reports did not provide a detailed motive, nor did they explain what happened in the moments before the gunfire. They also did not provide later public details about a trial, plea, conviction, or sentencing, leaving the known record centered on Artis's death, Taylor's arrest, and the murder charge filed in the immediate aftermath.
Artis was remembered in obituary information as someone born in Washington, D.C., who later lived in West Virginia and pursued different ambitions, including real estate and entertainment. Those personal details stand in painful contrast to the way his life ended: suddenly, violently, and in a public shooting that brought state police into Williamson and left his family and friends mourning a man who was only 29 years old.
