KENNA, W.Va. — A West Virginia man is accused of shooting his father in the face with a crossbow after an argument escalated inside the father’s home, leaving the older man gravely wounded but alive and sending deputies on a snowy chase across two counties before the suspect was arrested.
The case has drawn intense attention in Jackson County because of the violence of the injury, the close family relationship and the unlikely fact that the victim survived. Authorities identified the suspect as Chase Fleming, 35. He is charged with malicious assault in connection with the March 17 attack. Investigators say the shooting happened after a family argument that began over the phone and continued when Fleming drove to his father’s house. By the time deputies arrived, the victim was on a couch with severe facial wounds, and the suspect had already fled into the snow.
According to the criminal complaint and statements relayed by local authorities, Jackson County 911 received a call at about 2 p.m. Tuesday reporting that a man had been shot in the face with a crossbow at a home on Lightning Lane in the Kenna area. Deputies who reached the house found blood inside and John Fleming lying on a couch with a pillow covering the left side of his face. Family members told investigators that Chase Fleming and his father had been arguing over a pistol in the home. The complaint says the dispute started by phone, then resumed after the younger Fleming arrived in person carrying a loaded crossbow. At some point during that confrontation, authorities say, he fired. Sheriff Ross Mellinger later said the bolt struck the father just below his left eye and exited through the back of his head, an injury so severe that the sheriff publicly expressed amazement that the man lived through it.
Despite that wound, the victim survived long enough to be rushed for treatment and was later reported in stable condition at CAMC General Hospital. The public record does not yet say what surgeries or longer recovery may lie ahead, but even the first accounts made clear that the injuries were catastrophic. One detail in the criminal complaint gives the case an added human jolt: after the shooting, authorities say, Chase Fleming realized how badly his father was hurt and offered to take him to the hospital. A family member did not let him. That moment, brief as it is in the record, captures the strange emotional shape of many family violence cases. The same person accused of causing the injury was, at least for an instant, still inside the scene trying to respond to it. But by then, the damage had already been done, and the case was already moving toward a criminal investigation.
Instead of staying, prosecutors say, Fleming fled. Authorities said he left in a pickup truck and drove away from the Kenna area before law enforcement could stop him. The pursuit then widened across rugged, snow-covered ground in Jackson and Roane counties. Local accounts say he crashed the truck near the county border and continued on foot. Deputies, K-9 units and other officers tracked him through the snow during what the sheriff’s department later described as a very lengthy foot pursuit. By Wednesday morning, officers had him in custody. The sheriff’s office has not publicly released a full minute-by-minute pursuit narrative, but the broad outline is settled: a violent attack in a home, a truck flight into the countryside, a crash and an overnight search that ended with the suspect arrested rather than still missing.
The attack itself appears to have been direct and deliberate, at least as described by investigators. Sheriff Mellinger told local media that Chase Fleming came to the house with the crossbow already loaded. That point matters because it suggests more than a household argument that suddenly turned deadly with whatever object happened to be nearby. Investigators, at least publicly, are framing the case around a weapon brought to the confrontation ready to use. Yet many other parts of the story remain unclear in the open record. Authorities have not publicly said how long the phone argument lasted before Fleming drove to the house, why the dispute over the pistol had become so heated, whether anyone else was present in the room at the exact moment of the shot or whether additional charges may follow once prosecutors and a grand jury review the evidence. In that sense, the public knows the shape of the violence before it knows the full family history behind it.
The procedural path is now beginning to catch up to the shock of the first reports. Fleming was arraigned in Jackson County Magistrate Court and is being held on a $250,000 bond, according to local court reporting. A clerk told one outlet that if the bond is posted, conditions would include home confinement and monitoring. Public reports also say a preliminary hearing was scheduled for March 25. So far, it is not clear from the coverage reviewed whether Fleming has entered a plea or retained an attorney to speak publicly on his behalf. Authorities have also said additional charges are possible once the case is presented to a grand jury. That leaves the current criminal file both serious and incomplete. Malicious assault already captures the gravity of the injury, but prosecutors appear to be leaving room for the case to grow as they review the weapon, the statements of family members and the suspect’s actions before and after the shooting.
The setting has added to the force of the story. Kenna is not a place where a family shooting with a crossbow easily blends into the daily news flow. The weapon itself is part of what has made the case feel so jarring. Firearm violence is tragically familiar in police reporting. A crossbow attack inside a rural home carries a different kind of horror, not because it is legally more significant than a shooting with a gun, but because it feels older, stranger and harder to absorb. That reaction has only deepened because the victim lived. In many violent cases, death fixes the public story quickly. Here, survival makes the case more haunting. A man was struck in the face at close range, the bolt passed through his head, and yet he remained alive, turning what might have been a homicide investigation into an attempted-fatality case whose medical consequences may continue long after the first hearing.
The human core of the case is still likely to come from the father’s recovery, though the public has seen only fragments of that side so far. Most of what has been reported centers on the son’s actions, the chase and the criminal complaint. Far less is known publicly about John Fleming beyond his name, the injury and his condition after surgery and treatment. That imbalance is common in the first days of a violent felony case. The suspect is booked, charged and photographed. The victim is left in a hospital room, out of sight, carrying the harder and longer story. In this case, that story may include reconstructive care, neurological questions and the emotional fact that the person accused of inflicting the injury is his own son. None of that has been laid out in public filings yet, but it hangs over the case all the same.
As the case stands now, the first emergency phase is over. The victim survived the attack. The suspect has been arrested. The weapon and the argument that preceded the shooting are now part of a court record. What remains unresolved is how prosecutors will shape the case from here and what fuller account, if any, will emerge about the family conflict that led to the crossbow bolt being fired inside that house. For Jackson County, the next public milestone is likely to be the March 25 preliminary hearing, where the state may begin to describe in more detail how it intends to prove one of the year’s most unusual and brutal assault cases.