Dewey C. Shrewsbury, identified in West Virginia State Police records as Corporal Dewey Colen Shrewsbury, was a White/Caucasian man associated with South Charleston, West Virginia. By October 1978, Shrewsbury was an experienced member of the West Virginia State Police, having served with the agency for 16 years. His name appears on the State Police Hall of Honor and in the agency’s historical honor roll of members who died in the line of duty. No reliable online source reviewed provides his age, so it is not included here.
On Wednesday, October 25, 1978, Shrewsbury’s long law-enforcement career ended in a sudden firearms accident. According to the Officer Down Memorial Page, he was cleaning his service weapon when the gun discharged, fatally shooting him. The incident is formally categorized as an accidental discharge and his cause of death as “Gunfire.
” A separate compilation of fallen West Virginia officers likewise records October 25, 1978, as his end-of-watch date and describes the cause as inadvertent gunfire. Although the West Virginia State Police Hall of Honor more generally lists the event as a shooting, the more detailed memorial records consistently describe it as accidental rather than an intentional attack.
The circumstances therefore differ substantially from a homicide in which investigators would search for an assailant. The available online records describe Shrewsbury as having been accidentally shot by the service weapon he was handling and do not identify another person as having fired the fatal shot. No suspect is named in the independent sources reviewed, and there is no indication that another individual was considered responsible for causing his death. Nothing in those records points to an assault, ambush, confrontation, or other criminal act surrounding the shooting.
For the same reason, the available records do not document an arrest, criminal charge, prosecution, trial, or conviction connected with Shrewsbury’s death. The case is remembered in law-enforcement memorial records as an inadvertent firearm death rather than as an unsolved killing with a fugitive suspect. Shrewsbury left behind a wife and two children, and his death brought an abrupt end to 16 years of service with the West Virginia State Police. Decades later, his name remains among the fallen members honored by the agency, with October 25, 1978, preserved as the date of his death.
