Harold Wayne Westfall Jr., a 36-year-old White/Caucasian man, died on February 9, 2016, following a shooting inside his home in the Arden area of Barbour County near Philippi, West Virginia. Although some later memorial listings give his age as 37, funeral-home records list his birth date as March 8, 1979, making him 36 when he died. What initially appeared to authorities as a possible suicide quickly became a complicated shooting investigation because Westfall was found dead while his wife, Kimberly Dawn Westfall, was discovered seriously wounded in the same bedroom.
Shortly after 6 p.m. that Tuesday evening, a family member contacted 911 concerning the couple at their residence at 595 Proudfoot Road. The call was initially reported to law enforcement as a possible suicide. Trooper First Class S.E. Hevener of the West Virginia State Police responded along with Sgt. R.T. Deffet and Sgt. B. Miller of the Barbour County Sheriff’s Department.
Officers attempted to make contact with the people inside but received no response, eventually entering the residence to determine what had happened.
Inside the master bedroom, officers found Westfall lying on the floor. He had suffered a gunshot wound to the right side of his head and was already dead. Kimberly Westfall was found in the bed, wrapped in a blanket and suffering from gunshot injuries involving the area of her eye and ear. She was transported for emergency treatment to Ruby Memorial Hospital in Morgantown. Her condition was initially described as critical, but subsequent reporting said she had improved to stable condition.
The condition of the bedroom made determining exactly what had happened particularly important. Investigators recovered multiple firearms from the room and collected them as evidence. Police also examined the residence for indications that another person might have entered the home. Investigators reported that there were no signs of forced entry, and the preliminary investigation produced no evidence suggesting an intruder or other third party had participated in the shooting. State Police Lt. Michael Baylous emphasized that authorities did not believe there was anyone at large whom police needed to locate in connection with the incident.
The weapons and other evidence were sent for forensic examination as investigators attempted to determine the sequence of the gunfire and who had fired the shots. Police publicly stated that the incident appeared to involve only Harold and Kimberly Westfall, but they stopped short of announcing precisely how the shootings occurred. Even after additional details were released more than a week later, authorities continued to say that the circumstances leading to the gunshot wounds remained under investigation. The fact that the original emergency call referred to a possible suicide did not result in an immediate public determination that Westfall’s wound was self-inflicted, nor did investigators publicly characterize the incident as a murder-suicide in the contemporary reports.
The investigation therefore remained unusual in that there was a fatality, a critically injured surviving person and several firearms at the scene, but police said the physical evidence did not point toward an unknown assailant. Kimberly Westfall was identified as the other person involved in the incident, but the publicly available reporting reviewed does not show that police named her as a criminal suspect, arrested her or filed charges against her. Likewise, no outside suspect was publicly identified. Investigators instead focused on forensic evidence and reconstructing what had occurred between the two people inside the home.
Westfall’s death and his wife’s severe injuries had an immediate impact on their family. Contemporary reporting said the couple had children, including a son attending Davis & Elkins College, and a fundraising effort was established to help the family deal with funeral expenses and Kimberly’s medical bills while she remained hospitalized. The tragedy therefore left the family facing Westfall’s sudden death at the same time that Kimberly was recovering from serious gunshot injuries.
No publicly available follow-up located in the online reporting reviewed shows an arrest, indictment, criminal trial or conviction arising from Westfall’s death. The last substantive contemporary police accounts continued to describe the exact circumstances as unresolved while stating that there had been no forced entry and that investigators believed the shooting involved only the Westfalls. As a result, the available public record does not support naming an outside killer or treating Kimberly Westfall as a charged suspect. The case was publicly reported as a fatal shooting under investigation, with critical questions about who fired the individual shots and the precise sequence of events left unanswered in the reports released by authorities.
