Eric Wade Bias Sr., a 49-year-old White/Caucasian man, died on Friday, October 17, 2014, in Huntington, West Virginia. Contemporary records identify his death as the result of gun violence, and a local WSAZ report carried the headline “Man Killed in East Huntington Shooting Identified,” identifying Bias as the person who had been killed. His obituary reported that he died at his residence, placing the fatal incident within the community where he lived and worked.
Bias had been born May 30, 1965, in Oakland, California, to Florence Isabelle Bias and James Evermont Bias. By the time of his death he had made his life in Huntington, where he worked as a line supervisor at Red Lobster. Memorial information also describes him as a longtime Red Lobster employee and an enthusiastic Marshall Thundering Herd fan. He left behind his mother and three children, Eric Bias II, Stacey Bias and Pamela Bias, as well as siblings and grandchildren. Comments left after his death by friends and coworkers repeatedly remembered him as a friend who would be greatly missed, showing that the sudden violence affected far more than the immediate crime scene.
The surviving publicly accessible information about the shooting itself is limited. The preserved reference to the original WSAZ story establishes that police and local media treated the incident as a fatal shooting in East Huntington and that Bias was subsequently identified as the person killed. Gun-violence records likewise place his fatal shooting in Huntington on October 17. His obituary's statement that he died at his residence provides additional context, although the surviving sources do not provide a detailed reconstruction of what led up to the gunfire, how many shots were fired, whether anyone witnessed the shooting, or what investigators believed the motive to be.
Huntington was dealing with a measurable level of deadly violence that year. The Huntington Police Department's annual statistics recorded six murders in the city during 2014, along with a substantial number of aggravated assaults and weapons-law violations. Detectives in the department's investigative division were responsible for serious violent-crime investigations during this period. The surviving annual report, however, does not name Bias or provide a case-by-case accounting of the six killings, so it does not reveal what evidence investigators developed specifically in his case.
No publicly accessible source located for Bias's death identifies a named suspect or person of interest. Likewise, the surviving reports do not document an arrest, murder indictment, criminal charges, plea agreement, trial, conviction or sentencing connected specifically to his fatal shooting. That does not establish that investigators never developed suspects or additional information; it means that no such development could be confirmed from the available online reporting associated with the case. The original local-news page that reported the shooting is no longer available on WSAZ's current website, leaving only preserved references to its headline and the fact that Bias was identified as the victim.
Bias's family laid him to rest the following week. Funeral services were held October 24 at Chapman's Mortuary in Huntington, with Pastor Larry Greene officiating, followed by burial at White Chapel Memorial Gardens in Barboursville. His family asked that memorial donations be made to a fund established in his name. What remains publicly documented is the story of a Huntington father, grandfather, son, brother, friend and restaurant employee whose life ended suddenly in gunfire, while the identity of the person responsible and the circumstances that brought about the shooting remain absent from the surviving public record.
