Sheena Graves, a 19-year-old Black/African American woman from Charleston, West Virginia, was fatally shot on the night of July 4, 2016, during a burst of gunfire outside the Littlepage Terrace apartments on Charleston’s West Side. The shooting was reported at about 10 p.m. near McVey Way, off Washington Street West. Charleston police initially reconstructed the scene as a gun battle involving Clarence Murray and Danny Fortune, with Graves caught in the middle.
Investigators said she had been with one of the men when the shooting erupted and was struck by gunfire. She was rushed toward a hospital but died from her injuries while being transported. Murray and Fortune were also wounded in the exchange. Fortune was initially reported in critical condition, while Murray was hospitalized in stable condition.
The amount of gunfire suggested a chaotic confrontation rather than a single shot or isolated attack. Police said bullets struck property around the apartment complex, including a parked vehicle and residences. One nearby mother reported that a bullet passed through her window and struck her two-year-old child’s high chair. Investigators began interviewing witnesses and examining possible surveillance recordings as they tried to determine who had fired which shots. Authorities initially identified Murray, 39, and Fortune, 36, as the two men exchanging gunfire and said they did not believe Graves had been armed.
Murray became the first person to face a homicide charge. After he was treated and released from the hospital, Charleston detectives arrested him, and he was arraigned on a murder charge in connection with Graves’s death. Police alleged that Murray and Fortune had been shooting at one another when the fatal bullet or bullets struck Graves. Reporting from the Charleston Gazette-Mail also stated that Murray faced a malicious-wounding charge in connection with Fortune’s shooting. The investigation soon widened, however, as detectives developed evidence suggesting that more gunfire had come from elsewhere at Littlepage Terrace.
A second arrest followed on July 14. Jason Hairston, identified in contemporary reporting as a Charleston teenager, was taken into custody and charged with wanton endangerment involving a firearm. According to a criminal complaint described by the Charleston Gazette-Mail, a witness told police that Hairston fired multiple rounds from a second-floor apartment window at Murray while Murray was fleeing the scene. Hairston was not charged with murdering Graves, but his alleged gunfire complicated what police had first described as a two-person shootout and added another potential source of bullets to the scene.
By November 2016, prosecutors no longer believed the original account of the shooting was sufficiently certain to proceed against Murray for Graves’s death. Kanawha County Assistant Prosecutor Maryclaire Akers announced on November 2 that Murray’s murder charge had been dismissed. Akers said investigators were considering the possibility that a third shooter had been involved and were waiting for additional investigative work and ballistic evidence before deciding how the homicide should be prosecuted. The report indicated that the murder charge could potentially be filed again if the investigation produced evidence supporting it. Fortune, although identified as one of the people exchanging gunfire during the incident and himself wounded, was not charged in Graves’s death. Murray remained jailed at that point on an unrelated drug charge.
The shift in the investigation left the central question of whose gunfire actually killed Graves unresolved in the publicly available reporting located for the case. What began as an apparently straightforward crossfire case against Murray evolved into a more complicated shooting investigation involving gunfire attributed to Murray and Fortune and separate allegations that Hairston fired additional rounds. The murder charge against Murray did not lead to a trial or conviction in the reporting located, and no subsequent publicly reported prosecution or conviction for Graves’s killing was found among the later coverage reviewed.
