Calvin Lee Carlisle was 27 years old, a Black/African American man whose life ended in Beckley, West Virginia, on August 25, 2016. His death is recorded by the National Gun Violence Memorial as a fatal gun-violence incident. The online record shows that what began with the discovery of a body in Beckley quickly developed into a murder investigation.
Local news coverage preserved in the memorial’s source list first reported the discovery and then reported that police had identified Carlisle and were looking for a murder suspect.
As investigators worked to determine what had happened to Carlisle, the case moved from identifying the victim to searching for the person believed responsible for his death. The surviving online source trail includes a local report specifically concerning police identifying the body and looking for a murder suspect, showing that authorities were treating Carlisle’s death as a homicide and had reached the point of publicly pursuing a suspect. The currently accessible versions of those original local reports, however, do not retain enough article text to reliably reconstruct the precise circumstances in which Carlisle was found, the evidence that led investigators toward the suspect, or a publicly stated motive without relying on sources excluded from this synopsis.
The investigation did eventually produce an arrest. A subsequent local-news report listed with Carlisle’s case states that CrimeStoppers tips led to an arrest in the Beckley murder investigation. That indicates information supplied through the tip system helped authorities locate or identify the person being sought after Carlisle’s death. Another surviving source listing describes the development as the arrest of a Beckley man accused in a fatal shooting, establishing that the police search did not simply end with an unidentified suspect but progressed to someone being taken into custody.
The accessible independent online material located for the case does not preserve enough of the original reporting to responsibly identify the arrested suspect by name, specify the exact criminal charges filed against him, or describe the evidence police alleged connected him to Carlisle’s killing. Likewise, no independently accessible court or news source located in the available record confirms whether the prosecution ultimately resulted in a trial, guilty plea, conviction, acquittal, dismissal, or sentence. What can be established is that Carlisle was killed in a gun-violence incident in Beckley, police subsequently announced that they were looking for a murder suspect, and later reporting documented that CrimeStoppers information led to an arrest in the investigation.
