Update:  Birthday Celebration Turns Deadly In Lee County, VA

A birthday celebration turned deadly Friday night in a small Lee County, Virginia, community. Lee County Sheriff’s Department Investigator Taylor Scott said 25 year-old Amber Nash, of Ohio, used a steak knife to stab her boyfriend, Michael Meeker, in the chest. Scott said it happened around 11:00 p.m. at a home on Highway 58 in the community of Dot, about seven miles southeast of Pennington Gap.

Meeker was celebrating his 25th birthday with his brother, his brother’s wife, and Nash, when he and his girlfriend stepped into the kitchen, Scott said.

“They had been arguing off and on all day,” Scott added. “The next thing the brother hears is the (expletive) stabbed me.”

With the steak knife on the floor next to a puddle of blood, Meeker’s brother then grabbed the man, carried him to his car, and started driving towards Lee Medical Center, Scott said.

“He was probably about two miles from the hospital when his car broke down,” Scott said. Although a Good Samaritan stopped to help bring Meeker to the hospital, it was too late. Despite doctors efforts to save him, the man was pronounced dead. The strange twist of events has people in the community of Dot shocked.

“I actually was raised in this house until I was 14,” Patricia Bruner said of the home where the stabbing occurred. Now, she lives two doors down.

“That’s an awful thing to think is happening next door and I mean, I was right here and came in approximately the time it happened and didn’t even know it,” Bruner said.

At the Marathon Double Kwik, Dot’s only gas station, Assistant Manager Christina Bowen helped both the suspect and the victim on many occasions.

“The girl and him used to come in here all the time,” Bowen recalled. “They would cut up and laugh with you. You wouldn’t think that would happen to somebody like that. They seemed they were people that would get along real nice.“

Despite that impression, Nash is now charged with first-degree murder. She is being held at the Duffield Regional Jail without bond.