Woman arrested in Beckley pastor slaying

Monday, February 9, 2015
By Marcus Constantino, Multimedia reporter

Beckley police charged a woman with murder Monday after a Raleigh County pastor was bludgeoned amid a bizarre chain of events.

Camille Iman Brown, 19, of Westwood Drive in Beckley, was charged with first degree murder around 5 p.m. Monday for the slaying of Ronald Browning, 68, the pastor at Cool Ridge Community Church. Browning died in his Odessa Avenue home Saturday from what Beckley Cpl. Morgan Bragg described as “severe blunt force trauma injuries to his head and face.”

Bragg said the incident appears to be a random act of violence. Police still are working to determine why Browning, who had been enrolled at West Virginia University as a student until recently and had no criminal record, killed Browning in his home. ... “I would have to say this is the most … I don’t know how to term it, to be honest,” Bragg said. “It’s one of the most disturbing cases I’ve ever worked, if for no other reason than the lack of motive or the lack of understanding of the motive in this incident.”
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Brown already had been charged with entering without breaking and disorderly conduct Sunday after she was found in a Mabscott home “covered in blood, urine and feces” and with wounds on her hands, according to a criminal complaint filed in Raleigh Magistrate Court. She confessed to police while being transported to a hospital that she had killed a man near her home, according to the criminal complaint.