Christopher Lee Kelley was an 18-year-old White male whose life ended in a fatal shooting in MacArthur, West Virginia, on March 14, 2016. The shooting occurred at a residence on Bethel Road in Raleigh County. Kelley suffered a gunshot wound to the chest, and the incident quickly became the subject of an investigation by the Raleigh County Sheriff’s Office. Contemporary reports identified him as the person killed after authorities initially responded to and investigated the shooting.
As investigators began piecing together what had happened inside the residence, the circumstances did not appear to point toward an intentional attack. The Raleigh County Sheriff’s Office identified the person believed to have fired the fatal shot only as a juvenile male. Because the individual was a minor, his name was not released in the public reports located about the case.
Investigators said that, based on the information they had developed at that point, the shooting did not appear to have been intentional. The sheriff’s office nevertheless continued investigating the circumstances surrounding the discharge of the firearm and Kelley’s death.
There was some uncertainty in the earliest reporting about factors that may have surrounded the incident. One later account of the sheriff’s department update noted that alcohol had been mentioned in initial reporting, but the subsequent official release did not state that alcohol was a factor. Rather than confirming those early details, authorities emphasized that their investigation was continuing and that the available evidence indicated an accidental shooting. With the fatal shot having been fired by a juvenile, investigators were tasked with determining exactly how the firearm discharged and whether the circumstances justified any criminal action.
No arrest was announced in the sheriff’s initial investigation. Authorities specifically stated that no arrests had been made while describing the shooting as apparently unintentional. The publicly accessible reporting located concerning Kelley’s death does not identify a subsequent arrest, criminal charge, trial, guilty plea, or conviction arising from the shooting. Nor does the available reporting publicly identify the juvenile beyond describing him as the person involved in the shooting. The public record therefore leaves the case principally documented as a fatal accidental shooting rather than an intentional homicide with a named defendant prosecuted through the adult criminal courts.
