BEYOND WEAPON USED, NO OBVIOUS LINKS AMONG SHOOTING VICTIMS IN
CHARLESTON, W.VA.-AREA

CAMPBELLS CREEK, W.Va. -- The first was chatting on a pay telephone.
Another was filling the gas tank of her candy-apple red Pontiac Trans
Am. The third was buying milk.

They had different backgrounds, different hopes for the future. But
all were killed in the same way, each shot once with the same
.22-caliber gun while standing outside convenience stores in the
Charleston area.

Sheriff David Tucker has suggested drugs as a possible motive in the
killings of Jeanie Patton, 31, and Okey Meadows Jr., 26. Both lived in
Campbells Creek, an area residents have told investigators is rife
with drugs.

But family members and friends of the victims defend them against the
insinuation. Drugs haven't been mentioned in connection with the other
victim, Gary Carrier Jr., 44, and Charleston Police Chief Jerry Pauley
has said police had found no drug connections to him.

"I never did see my daughter drunk, doped up or anything, but we're
just waiting that part out," said Joyce Patton, Jeanie Patton's
mother. "But I don't see how she could be (on drugs) when she worked
all the time."

Meadows was killed about 90 minutes after Patton. He was paying for
milk at the outside window of a Go-Mart on U.S. Route 60 when he was
shot.

"Okey was definitely not into drugs," said longtime friend and
weightlifting buddy Brett Page. Family members said Meadows had
planned to study either criminal justice or military science at West
Virginia State College.

A nephew of Carrier, the first of the three victims, said his uncle
"didn't have nobody after him."

"He was the kind of guy who, if he owed you, he paid you," Richie
Thaxton said of Carrier, who lived in South Charleston. "Somebody was
trigger-happy because I don't think (he) owed anybody. Everybody got
along with him."

The lack of a readily apparent link has fueled public fears that the
victims might have been picked at random, like the victims of the
sniper shootings last fall in Virginia, Maryland and the District of
Columbia. Two men were arrested in connection with the 13 sniper attacks.

Shortly after the second and third shootings in West Virginia, the FBI
and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives joined West
Virginia and local authorities in the investigation. Police said they
have received more than 600 tips.

Authorities on Sunday were still searching for at least two men _ a
heavyset, goateed man believed to have been in a dark-colored Ford
F-150 pickup described by witnesses and a man with "skinny white legs"
who is considered a possible witness.

Carrier was shot the night of Aug. 10 outside a Go-Mart in downtown
Charleston. Thaxton said his uncle was answering a page from his
ex-wife when he was killed. Carrier was trying to quit drinking and he
smoked cigarettes, but Thaxton insisted he was drug-free.

He had been staying with Tinker Cole, a friend who was helping him
stop drinking, Thaxton said. Two hours before he died, Carrier
telephoned Cole to say he was spending the night with an unidentified
friend and planned to apply for a maintenance job at the University of
Charleston the next morning.

"(Carrier) was just a regular guy who could get along with everybody,"
Thaxton said. "All he did was drink his beer, and he was trying to get
off of that."

On Aug. 14, Patton and Meadows were killed in separate shootings about
10 miles apart outside rural convenience stores east of Charleston.

Patton had spent the day with her mother. The part-time janitor and
cook for Kanawha County schools was shot while pumping gas into her
car at a Speedway convenience store about six miles from her home.

She and her mother had attended a Kanawha County school board meeting
that night, and mother and daughter had had a heart-to-heart talk in
the parking lot of a Taco Bell in Charleston.

They discussed the future, the possibility of the school board hiring
Jeanie as a full-time cook and Jeanie's 9-month-old niece, on whom she
lavished gifts.

"She was as happy as she could be," Joyce Patton said.

Jeanie Patton and her companion, Martin Walker, had moved to Campbells
Creek in early July after their home northeast of Charleston was
ravaged by mid-June floods.

Walker refused to be interviewed. A man answering the telephone at his
home angrily said, "He don't need this right now" before hanging up.

"It's tough to accept," Joyce Patton said. "That was my baby
girl."