Two dead in shooting at private home near Brushfork community | News

Bluefield – Detectives and sheriff's department officers were dispatched early Monday morning after an uninvited guest and subsequent fatal shooting were reported at a home on Route 123 in the Brushfork area near the city of Bluefield.

Mercer County officials responded to a complaint about an unwanted guest on Brushfork Road near Bluefield around 7:37 a.m., said Lt. SA Sommers of the Mercer County Sheriff's Department. The complainant stated that her daughter's estranged boyfriend was in the apartment and refused to leave.

While officers were responding, a resident near Brushfork Road called Mercer 911 and reported hearing gunshots.

The shooting occurred around 7:50 a.m., Sommers said. When officers arrived, they found a woman in her late 20s dead from multiple gunshot wounds.

Shortly after arriving at the scene, Mercer County 911 notified officers that the male shooter had been found dead by Bluefield police from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, Sommers said.

“This will be a domestic incident,” Sommers said at the scene. “A 26-year-old woman was murdered in her mother's home. The shooter was an estranged partner and killed himself in Bluefield. After the shooting, he fled the scene and by the time Bluefield police arrived at the home, he had already killed himself.”

“We have examined the scene and collected evidence,” Sommers said. “The medical examiner has arrived to conduct his independent investigation and now we are waiting for the fire department.”

The victim's children were in the house during the shooting, he said.

Due to the sensitive nature of the investigation, the Mercer County Sheriff's Department will not release the names of the parties involved.

“We still have some additional investigation to do,” he said. “It's a domestic murder-suicide case, and we're not going to have a lot of information after that because the three children, their mother and their father are involved, and they were here, and it's just a terrible and unnecessary loss of life. And as far as the family and the children are concerned, we're probably not going to have much more to say.”

Sommers is the lead investigator on the case.

Contact Greg Jordan at [email protected]