Donté Lee Ward was a 19-year-old Black/African American male from Huntington, West Virginia, whose death became part of one of the city’s most haunting unsolved crimes. In the early morning hours of May 22, 2005, Ward was outside his home at 1410 Charleston Avenue with Eddrick Clark, Michael Dillon and Megan Poston. The gathering came only hours after Huntington High School’s prom.
At approximately 4:30 a.m., gunfire erupted, and all four young people were shot to death outside the residence. The killings quickly became known throughout Huntington as the “Prom Night Murders.”
Investigators soon began to believe Ward may have been the intended target and that the other three victims were killed because they happened to be with him. The investigation developed against the backdrop of a drug-trafficking pipeline that had brought dealers from the Detroit area into Huntington. Police came to suspect that Ward’s killing may have been retaliation connected to drugs or money. Court records later revealed that investigators believed Ward had taken a substantial quantity of marijuana from Cherylethia “Bunny” Holmes, a Detroit-connected drug dealer who was operating in Huntington. Holmes acknowledged to investigators that marijuana had been taken from her residence, although she denied being responsible for the murders.
The investigation produced increasingly specific information during the summer of 2005. On July 5, a cooperating witness told Huntington police that Shannon Dennis had been talking about driving a vehicle involved in the killings and disposing of the murder weapon in the Ohio River. Another cooperating witness later told investigators that a man known as “T” or “Trouble” had claimed responsibility for killing the four victims over a drug debt involving Ward. Police identified the man known by those names as Jamal LaRonne Ray, who also used the name Jamal Douglas.
On July 25, 2005, Dennis gave investigators a voluntary statement that became one of the most significant developments in the case. According to federal court records, Dennis told detectives that he had witnessed Ray, also known as Douglas, commit the four murders. Dennis further admitted that he assisted in leaving the scene and threw the alleged murder weapon into the Ohio River. He told investigators that they fled in a white 1987 Chevrolet Monte Carlo with a gray interior.
Police found additional information that appeared to support portions of Dennis’s account. Investigators determined that Ray had been driving a white 1987 Monte Carlo and that the vehicle had subsequently been painted blue. A Huntington police report documented Ray driving the vehicle in July, and by the time investigators sought a warrant it was parked outside his residence on Marshall Avenue. Based on Dennis’s statement, information from another cooperating witness and the vehicle evidence, Huntington police obtained a search warrant for Ray’s home on July 26.
During the search, investigators seized a. 40-caliber semiautomatic pistol and a 7.62 mm rifle. Because Ray was already a convicted felon, possession of those weapons resulted in a federal firearms prosecution. He ultimately entered a conditional guilty plea to possession of a firearm by a convicted felon and received a sentence of 34 months in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release. His challenge to the search was later rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit. The federal appellate court specifically noted that investigators had sufficient probable cause to believe he was involved in the four homicides when they sought the search warrant. Nevertheless, Ray was never prosecuted for the murders, and his federal conviction was for the firearm offense rather than the deaths of Ward, Clark, Dillon and Poston.
The investigation also focused heavily on Cherylethia “Bunny” Holmes. Huntington police have publicly stated that they believe Holmes was behind the Prom Night Murders and ordered the killings, with Ward believed to have been the principal target. Holmes has consistently denied involvement, and prosecutors have never charged her in connection with the quadruple homicide. Her name nevertheless remained associated with the investigation for decades.
Holmes was separately prosecuted for another Huntington killing that occurred before Ward’s death. In that case, Wendy Morgan was shot and killed in 2004 after allegedly taking drugs and money from Holmes. Prosecutors accused Holmes of ordering Morgan’s murder, and a jury ultimately convicted her of first-degree murder as an accessory before the fact. She received a life sentence with the possibility of parole. That conviction did not involve Ward or the other three Prom Night Murder victims, but investigators have repeatedly cited Holmes’s alleged role in the Ward case when discussing the still-unsolved quadruple homicide.
Despite the statements implicating Ray, the information provided by Dennis and other witnesses, the search of Ray’s residence, and law enforcement’s longstanding belief that Holmes ordered the attack, the evidence never resulted in murder charges. No one has been tried or convicted for killing Ward, Clark, Dillon or Poston. Public reporting marking the twentieth anniversary in 2025 stated that no arrests had been made in the quadruple homicide itself, and coverage marking 21 years in May 2026 continued to describe the murders as unsolved.
More than two decades after the gunfire on Charleston Avenue, investigators have therefore been left with a case in which suspected participants and a suspected motive emerged, but no homicide prosecution followed. Ward is widely believed by investigators to have been the focus of a retaliatory attack, while his three companions were caught in the same deadly encounter. The federal court record preserves unusually detailed allegations about who may have carried out the shootings and who may have helped afterward, yet those allegations have never been tested before a jury in a prosecution for the four murders. The deaths of Ward, Eddrick Clark, Michael Dillon and Megan Poston remain officially unresolved, with no person convicted of the killings.
