From the moment word began to filter out earlier this week that Ben Hatfield had been murdered, friends and associates asked “why?”
Hatfield, an engineer and long-time coal executive in West Virginia, was well-liked. Even those on the opposite side of him in the often-contentious coal business respected him, according to a profile in the Charleston Gazette-Mail.
“Those who knew Hatfield described him as a strong family man who was by his wife’s side through a 12-year battle with breast cancer that ended with her 2009 death, a supportive friend who seldom had a harsh word for anyone, and a deeply religious West Virginia native who shared his own success by giving back to his community,” wrote Ken Ward.
In fact, Hatfield was tending to the grave of his late wife and other relatives at the Mountain View Memory Gardens cemetery in Mingo County last Sunday when he was maliciously gunned down.
Investigators say Anthony Arriaga, 20, and Brandon Fitzpatrick, 18, had traveled from Wayne County to Mingo County, looking for someone to rob, presumably to get drug money. They saw Hatfield’s GMC Denali and figured he was a good target.
But instead of just taking Hatfield’s wallet or his vehicle, police say Arriaga walked up behind him and fired twice, hitting him once in the back. Hatfield stumbled over the nearby riverbank, where he died.
Fitzpatrick drove off in a panic, leaving Arraiga to hitch a ride back to Wayne County. The Mingo County Sheriff’s Department and the West Virginia State Police quickly rounded up the pair, along with a third suspect, Ricky Peterson, who is charged with lying to police.
Sheriff James Smith called the murder a random act of violence, and when crimes like this occur the tendency is to say that the victim was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. In fact, Hatfield was in the right place, carrying out the appropriate duties of a loving widower.
His assailants are the ones who are out of place in a civil society… drug-addled miscreants whose depravity has caused the tragic and untimely death of a good man.