Housein Keaton, a 33-year-old Black/African American man from Charleston, West Virginia, was shot and killed during the early morning hours of August 26, 2016, on Charleston’s West Side. Police said the shooting occurred at about 2 a.m. outside an apartment in an alley near Randolph and Wyoming streets. Keaton was on or near the porch when he was struck by multiple gunshots. Emergency personnel responded, but he was already dead when they arrived.
Charleston police treated the death as a targeted killing rather than an apparently random act, although investigators cautioned at the time that the investigation was still in its earliest stages.
The killing occurred during an especially violent stretch of the night in Charleston. Less than two hours before Keaton was killed, another fatal shooting had taken place at Renaissance Circle, where one person died and two others were wounded. Police specifically said they did not believe the Renaissance Circle violence and Keaton’s killing were connected. Investigators began canvassing the neighborhood around Randolph and Wyoming streets, looking for witnesses and information that could explain who had approached Keaton and why he had been singled out. Lt. Steve Cooper of the Charleston Police Department said investigators already had a lead by that Friday morning, but authorities would not disclose what the lead involved. Cooper also said he believed Keaton had been targeted. Police would not say how many people might have been involved and did not publicly identify a suspect.
The circumstances surrounding the day before Keaton’s death added another layer to the investigation. Court records showed that an ex-girlfriend had accused him of domestic assault on August 25. According to the criminal complaint described by local reporting, she alleged that Keaton was armed, chased her and threatened to kill her. A domestic-violence protection matter and a criminal charge followed, but Keaton was not taken into custody before he was killed. After his death, the pending charge was dismissed. Police declined to say whether the domestic dispute was connected to the shooting, leaving open the possibility without publicly establishing it as a motive.
What happened with that domestic-assault proceeding later became part of an unrelated judicial disciplinary case. Kanawha County Magistrate Jack Pauley was accused of mishandling matters connected to Keaton’s case, including signing a domestic-violence protection order that lacked required information, leaving his night shift early and failing to sign an arrest warrant. Keaton therefore had not been arrested on the domestic-assault allegation before he was found fatally shot the following morning. The West Virginia Supreme Court ultimately upheld a 45-day unpaid suspension and censure of Pauley for judicial-conduct violations involving Keaton’s case and another case. That disciplinary proceeding addressed the magistrate’s conduct, not responsibility for Keaton’s homicide.
Available online reporting does not identify anyone who was subsequently arrested, charged, tried or convicted for killing Keaton. The contemporaneous reports show that Charleston police believed the shooting was deliberate, had developed at least one investigative lead and were searching for whoever was responsible, but they did not publicly name a suspect or even specify the number of possible suspects. Searches of later reporting likewise did not produce a reliable public record of a homicide arrest or prosecution tied to Keaton’s death. Based on the available online sources, the case remained without a publicly identified killer, and the reported investigative lead did not result in any publicly documented arrest or conviction.
