William Frank Porter, a 39-year-old White/Caucasian male, was serving as a federal Prohibition agent when he was killed on June 20, 1925, at Camp Creek, West Virginia. Porter worked for the United States Department of the Treasury’s Internal Revenue Service Prohibition Unit, the federal force charged with enforcing national liquor laws during Prohibition. By that morning he had spent several years in the dangerous work of locating illicit distilleries and enforcing federal alcohol laws. He had joined the Prohibition Unit on October 18, 1920, and was being paid an annual salary of $1,800. He had a wife and a son named William waiting at home when he set out on what was supposed to be another raid on an illegal still.
In the early morning darkness, Porter and a party of federal agents moved into the Camp Creek area intending to raid a still.
What the federal party apparently did not know was that officers from the West Virginia Department of Prohibition were approaching the same area for essentially the same purpose. The state officers likewise had not been informed that the federal raiding party was already operating there. The lack of coordination created a deadly situation: two armed groups of prohibition officers were moving through the same countryside expecting to encounter people involved in illegal moonshine production, but neither group recognized the other as law enforcement. A historical account of West Virginia prohibition enforcement later described the episode as “friendly fire” resulting from an uncoordinated state and federal raid on a still site near Huntington.
When the two parties encountered one another, each side mistook the other for moonshiners. Gunfire erupted before the terrible mistake could be corrected. Porter was struck during the exchange, while West Virginia Prohibition Officer David “George” Ball was also fatally wounded. Another state prohibition officer was wounded but survived. The available accounts describe the shooting as inadvertent rather than an ambush by bootleggers or a deliberate attack on law enforcement. The tragedy was therefore not a conventional raid in which moonshiners opened fire on approaching officers; instead, the federal and state prohibition forces themselves exchanged the shots because each believed it was confronting the criminal group it had come to find. Porter and Ball died as a direct consequence of that mistaken identification.
The surviving online accounts do not identify the particular officer who fired the shot that killed Porter, nor do they assign criminal responsibility for his death to Ball or to any other member of either raiding party. They also do not identify a moonshiner as having taken part in the firefight. The official and memorial descriptions consistently characterize Porter's death as accidental or inadvertent gunfire between the two law-enforcement groups. No suspect is identified in connection with his killing, and the available online records do not document an arrest, murder charge, criminal trial, or conviction arising from Porter's death. Likewise, they do not indicate that any member of the federal or state party was prosecuted for the exchange of gunfire. The records instead preserve the event as a catastrophic enforcement mistake in which officers pursuing the same objective unknowingly became adversaries for a few fatal moments.
Porter’s death occurred during an especially hazardous period of Prohibition enforcement in West Virginia, when state, federal, county, and local officers regularly searched remote areas for hidden stills and illegal liquor operations. Such enforcement could involve heavily armed officers moving through isolated terrain in darkness or before daylight, often expecting resistance from people whose livelihood depended on avoiding capture. In Porter’s case, however, the danger came not from a documented suspect but from the failure of two legitimate enforcement parties to know that the other was in the field. By the time their identities became clear, Porter and Ball had been mortally wounded and another officer had been shot, leaving the Camp Creek raid remembered not for the capture of a moonshiner, but for one of the most tragic kinds of law-enforcement deaths: officers mistakenly firing upon officers.
