Qualla: 2020 Williamsburg Massacre

2020 Williamsburg Massacre: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Five children climbed off a school bus on a December afternoon in 2020 and walked into a house that should have been a refuge. By evening, all five were dead. The youngest was one year old. The oldest had just turned seven. In the rural quiet of Greenbrier County, where Williamsburg sits among the folded ridges of southeastern West Virginia, what happened on December 8 became the worst mass shooting in the state's history - and, through the lawsuit that followed, a flashpoint in West Virginia's long reckoning over how it protects children.

2020 Williamsburg Massacre: The Children

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Before they were a statistic, they were five small lives. Three were the biological children of 25-year-old Oreanna Myers. Two were her stepchildren. They lived in a two-story house on a road that winds through the kind of West Virginia hills where neighbors are minutes apart by ...

2020 Williamsburg Massacre: The Warnings

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Whether there had been warning signs is disputed. The biological mother of two of the children later sued the West Virginia Department of Health and Human Resources, and it is from that lawsuit that the most haunting allegations come: that in August 2020, four months before the k...

2020 Williamsburg Massacre: Greenbrier County

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Williamsburg is an unincorporated community in Greenbrier County, the kind of place where the population is measured by post office boxes rather than census tracts. The Greenbrier River curves nearby. The Monongahela National Forest spreads to the north. Most days, the loudest so...

2020 Williamsburg Massacre: What Comes After

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is no satisfying ending to a story like this. Oreanna Myers left a note that referenced demons taking over her. She set the house on fire and walked outside to take her own life. The investigation closed the way such investigations close: with a determination of what happen...

2020 Williamsburg Massacre: Remembering

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Stories like this resist easy closure, and they should. The temptation, in writing about a place where something terrible happened, is to leave the terrible thing as the only thing. But Williamsburg is also a school bus stop on a winter morning, and a dentist who saw a bruise and...