Brian Darrell Ruffin, a 36-year-old Black man from Beckley, West Virginia, was shot on the night of December 22, 2020, at about 10:30 p.m. Officers responded to reports of shots fired at an apartment complex at 106 Pershing Avenue and found Ruffin with a gunshot wound to his side. He was taken to a local hospital and died there on December 24, 2020. The death was ruled a homicide and Beckley Police detectives opened an investigation.

Police identified Tyajaha Robinson as a suspect and arrested him on an initial malicious wounding charge; after Ruffin’s death the charge was upgraded to first-degree murder and Robinson was arraigned in Raleigh County Magistrate Court in January 2021. News reports from the previous year note Ruffin had been publicly identified by police as a suspect in an October 2019 bank robbery in which a person wearing a monkey mask fled with more than $6,000 after passing a demand note to a teller.

If anyone has information about the shooting at 106 Pershing Avenue or knew Brian Ruffin, please come forward to authorities.