Dennis Claude Stanley was 69 years old, male, and White when an encounter with law enforcement ended in his death on September 10, 2016, in the Montcalm area of Mercer County, West Virginia. Stanley, a Montcalm resident, was on or near West Virginia Route 71 when authorities were called about a man reportedly behaving erratically and displaying what appeared to be a firearm. A Mercer County sheriff’s deputy responded to the scene, turning what had begun as a report of an armed individual along the roadway into a fatal confrontation.
The deputy who confronted Stanley was later identified as Adam Ballard. According to subsequent accounts of the investigation, Stanley was standing in the middle of Route 71 and was holding an object that appeared to be a handgun. Investigators determined afterward that the weapon was actually a toy pistol or replica rather than a functioning firearm. That fact, however, was not apparent to the responding deputy during the confrontation.
Prosecutor George Sitler later said that Ballard repeatedly ordered Stanley to raise his hands, giving the command more than a dozen times before the shooting occurred. Stanley did not comply in a manner that brought the encounter to an end, and Ballard ultimately fired, killing him at the scene.
The investigation also examined Stanley’s condition and behavior leading up to the shooting. Sitler said toxicology and investigative information showed that Stanley had been intoxicated and had other substances in his system. Authorities also learned that he had reportedly been experiencing personal difficulties and had become increasingly withdrawn from members of his family before his death. Those circumstances became part of the prosecutor’s evaluation of what Ballard was confronted with on the roadway and whether the deputy reasonably believed the object in Stanley’s possession presented a deadly threat.
The case was treated as an officer-involved shooting rather than as a conventional homicide investigation involving an unidentified fleeing suspect. West Virginia State Police investigated the circumstances surrounding the shooting, while the Mercer County prosecutor reviewed the evidence to determine whether criminal charges against Ballard were warranted. The central questions were what Stanley appeared to be doing with the pistol-shaped object, whether he obeyed commands, and what the deputy reasonably could have known in the moments before he fired. The later discovery that the pistol was a toy did not by itself establish criminal wrongdoing because the legal review focused on the threat as it appeared to the deputy at the time of the encounter.
By January 2017, the review had concluded with Ballard being cleared of wrongdoing. Sitler determined that the evidence did not justify criminal prosecution of the deputy for Stanley’s death. No arrest was made in connection with the shooting, and Ballard was not charged with homicide or another criminal offense. Because investigators concluded that the deputy’s use of deadly force was legally justified under the circumstances presented to him, the case did not proceed to a criminal trial, and there was consequently no conviction arising from Stanley’s death.
Stanley’s death therefore ended not with the arrest of a civilian suspect but with an official investigation into the actions of the law-enforcement officer who fired the fatal shots. The investigation established that Stanley had possessed a replica or toy pistol, that the responding deputy perceived a potentially armed threat, and that repeated commands were reportedly given before the shooting. After reviewing those circumstances, prosecutors declined to pursue charges against Ballard, leaving the September 10 encounter on Route 71 as a fatal police shooting for which authorities determined no criminal prosecution was warranted.
