Richard Vance

Richard Vance was a Branchland, West Virginia resident whose life was rooted in the small, close-knit communities of Lincoln County. Public records and contemporaneous reporting show he was 34 years old when he died on October 13, 2022. While detailed public biographical material such as a family-published obituary or funeral notice could not be located, what is clear from reliable sources is that Richard was known locally as a member of the Branchland community — a person with neighbors, friends, and everyday ties to the place he called home.

Small-town lives are often best understood through the relationships people keep: the family meals, the local gatherings, the casual greetings on a road like Sand Gap, and the quiet ways neighbors look out for one another. Those ordinary ties are the texture of community life in Branchland, and they help frame what Richard’s presence meant to people around him. Although the public record available to researchers does not supply fuller details about his work, hobbies, or extended family, the fact that his death was reported by regional news outlets indicates he was a known member of the neighborhood whose loss was felt beyond a single household.

On the evening of October 13, 2022, Richard suffered a fatal injury and was transported to Cabell Huntington Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Local law-enforcement reporting from the time treated the shooting as a homicide and identified an individual who was arrested and charged in connection with the incident; subsequent public reporting located by this research does not provide a reliably verified final court disposition. Because there is no family-posted obituary or funeral-home notice matching the exact date of death available in public, this remembrance focuses on Richard’s life and personhood rather than the limited investigatory record.

Richard’s life — like so many lives lived outside the headlines — mattered in everyday, human ways that public sources only hint at: as a neighbor on a West Virginia road, as someone who belonged to a local place and its people. Those who knew him best will remember particulars that are not part of the public record; this short remembrance honors the fact that a real person is behind the entry in news reports and databases. May his friends and family find comfort in their memories of him and in the community that shared his life.