Clayton Wayne Ware, a 33-year-old White/Caucasian man, was fatally shot on January 20, 2016, inside an apartment at Circle J Square in Fairlea, West Virginia. Local authorities were alerted at approximately 4:15 p.m., bringing members of the Greenbrier County Sheriff’s Office to the apartment complex along with officers from the West Virginia State Police and Lewisburg Police Department. When investigators entered the residence, they found Ware dead from a gunshot wound.
The circumstances surrounding the shooting quickly focused investigators' attention on Travis Norwood, who was identified in contemporary reports as being 29 and also from the Fairlea area. Investigators said Ware and Norwood had spent much of that afternoon together. At some point, however, their time together deteriorated into what authorities described as a severe altercation.
Gunfire erupted during the confrontation, leaving Ware mortally wounded inside the apartment.
Norwood spoke with investigators after the shooting and gave an account portraying the shooting as the result of an alleged robbery attempt. According to the Greenbrier County Sheriff’s Department information reported at the time, Norwood claimed that Ware had attempted to rob him. Authorities did not immediately accept that account as a final determination of what had happened. Instead, investigators continued examining the evidence surrounding the confrontation, including the circumstances that led to the fight and the discharge of the firearm.
No criminal charge was announced in the immediate aftermath of Ware's death. The sheriff’s department specifically said investigators were continuing their inquiry and would wait for the results of an autopsy before determining whether charges should be filed. That left Norwood as the identified person involved in the fatal confrontation, but not as someone who had been formally charged with murder or another homicide offense in the reports published immediately after the shooting. The available contemporary reporting does not describe an arrest of Norwood for Ware's death.
Ware's obituary provides a glimpse of the life that ended that afternoon. It identified him as Clayton Wayne Ware, born November 12, 1982, in Ronceverte, West Virginia, to Thomas Wayne Ware and Avril Grace Canter Ware. He worked at McDonald’s in Fairlea and left behind five children, as well as his father, grandmother, sister, brother and other relatives. Funeral services were held on January 26, followed by cremation.
Later court records show that Travis Ray Norwood subsequently became the defendant in a separate Greenbrier County criminal prosecution, but the case was not a prosecution for Ware's shooting. On June 1, 2016, several months after Ware was killed, Norwood sold heroin to a confidential informant working with the Greenbrier Valley Drug and Violent Crime Task Force. He was indicted in October 2016 for delivery of heroin and was convicted by a Greenbrier County jury in May 2017. Because he had two earlier felony convictions in Virginia, prosecutors pursued West Virginia's recidivist sentencing provisions, and Norwood ultimately received a life sentence. His conviction and sentence were later upheld by the Supreme Court of Appeals of West Virginia.
The published appellate decisions concerning Norwood's later prosecution discuss his drug offense and earlier felony convictions in considerable detail but do not identify Ware's death as one of Norwood's convictions or as the basis for a homicide prosecution. No online source located for Ware's case documents a murder indictment, homicide trial, guilty plea, or homicide conviction arising from the January 20 shooting. Based on the publicly available reporting, the shooting therefore remained a case in which Norwood was identified as the person involved and claimed that he had acted during an attempted robbery, while investigators initially withheld a charging decision pending further investigation and the autopsy.
