Robert Brian Shockley was a 38-year-old White/Caucasian man whose life ended in a violent murder-suicide in Milton, West Virginia, on October 3, 2006. Shockley was from Oakdale, California, and worked for the California-based medical identification service MedicAlert. He was reportedly married and had a child of his own, and he was in West Virginia on business when circumstances brought him to a residence in the 1300 block of Washington Avenue in Milton.
At about 7:30 that Tuesday
evening, emergency dispatchers received a call that sent Milton police to the Washington Avenue home. When officers arrived, they encountered the aftermath of a devastating shooting. Shockley and Jason Carder were both found suffering from fatal gunshot wounds inside the residence, while Carder's estranged wife, Lara Danielle Turley Carder, had been seriously wounded.
Investigators determined that Jason Carder had confronted the situation and opened fire. Police said Carder shot Shockley inside the home, killing him. Lara then attempted to get away, but Carder pursued her outside and shot her twice. After shooting Lara, Carder returned to the residence and fatally shot himself. Shockley and Carder died at the scene, while Lara remained alive long enough to be transported by medical helicopter to Cabell Huntington Hospital. Despite efforts to save her, she died the following afternoon from her injuries.
One particularly disturbing aspect of the shooting was that Lara and Jason Carder's young son was inside the home while the violence unfolded. The child was not physically injured and was subsequently placed in the care of relatives. What might otherwise have been viewed initially as a confrontation involving three adults was therefore part of a much broader domestic crisis that had already been developing before the shootings.
Contemporary accounts described Lara and Jason Carder's marriage as deeply troubled in the months preceding the killings. Lara had obtained a domestic violence petition against her estranged husband. Jason had also discussed their marital problems publicly on his MySpace page, describing his life as deteriorating and accusing Lara of infidelity, taking money from their bank account, and using their son against him. His online writings portrayed a man consumed by the collapse of the marriage and increasingly distressed about his separation from Lara and their child.
Shockley's presence added another dimension to the tragedy. He was not a local resident and was reportedly in the Milton area because of his work. News coverage at the time identified him as a MedicAlert employee from California and indicated that authorities were initially uncertain about the precise circumstances that had brought Shockley and Lara together. Whatever Jason Carder believed about their relationship, police ultimately identified Carder as the person responsible for shooting Shockley and Lara before turning the gun on himself.
Because the suspected killer died at the scene, there was no arrest, criminal prosecution, trial, or conviction in Shockley's killing. Authorities treated the deaths as a murder-suicide rather than an unresolved homicide with an unidentified offender. Jason Carder was identified by police as the shooter responsible for Shockley's death and Lara's fatal injuries, and his suicide brought any possibility of criminal charges against him to an immediate end.
Shockley's death became part of an especially grim sequence of domestic violence incidents occurring in the region at the time. For his family, however, the circumstances were uniquely devastating: a business trip far from his California home ended suddenly inside a West Virginia residence, where he became a victim of a domestic conflict that erupted into gunfire. By the time the violence was over and Lara died from her wounds the following day, three lives had been lost and two families were left dealing with the consequences of a murder-suicide that had unfolded in a matter of minutes.
