A professional cornhole player who is a quadruple amputee has been arrested in connection with a fatal shooting.

Dayton Webber, 27, is accused of killing a man in the front seat of his car during an argument on Sunday in his hometown of La Plata, Md.— about 30 miles south of Washington, D.C. — according to the Charles County Sheriff’s Office.

The sheriff’s office said in a press release that passengers in the backseat saw Webber shoot Bradrick Michael Wells, also 27, before he pulled over and asked them “to help pull the victim out of the car.” They refused and left, at which point Webber “fled with the victim still in the car.” All of the passengers knew each other, authorities said.

Nearly two hours later, a resident of Charlotte Hall, Md., about 14 miles away, called police to report “a body in a yard,” the sheriff’s office said. Responders identified Wells and pronounced him dead at the scene.

Detectives found Webber’s car over 100 miles away in Charlottesville, Va., and got a warrant for his arrest. They were helped in their search by Virginia’s Albemarle County Police Department, which said in a separate statement that one of its officers spotted Webber’s vehicle at a gas station and used surveillance footage to track him down.

Webber was arrested at a local hospital, where authorities said he was “seeking treatment for a medical issue.” He was charged as a fugitive from justice, and public records show he was booked into the Albemarle-Charlottesville Regional Jail on Monday.

The sheriff’s office says Webber is awaiting extradition back to Maryland, where he will be charged with first-degree murder, second-degree murder and “other related charges.”

Jail superintendent Col. Martin Kumer told NPR in an email that the court “did not address extradition” at its Tuesday morning hearing. He said Webber’s next scheduled court date is “sometime in April,” though his attorney could potentially ask for one even sooner.

Dayton Webber was booked into a Virginia jail on Monday.

Charles County Sheriff’s Office

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Charles County Sheriff’s Office

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NPR has reached out to Webber’s attorney and Albemarle County court for comment but did not hear back in time for publication. The Charles County State’s Attorney’s office declined to comment.

Authorities say the murder investigation is ongoing, and are asking anyone with relevant information to call or submit tips online.

Webber’s path to pro cornhole 

At 10 months old, Webber was diagnosed with a bacterial infection, Streptococcus pneumoniae, that turned so aggressive he was given last rites.

“They had actually given me a 3% chance of living, and the only way that they were able to save me was by getting the infections out of my system,” he said in a 2024 ESPN video. “They had to amputate my arms and legs to keep me alive.”

That didn’t stop Webber from pursuing and excelling at sports, including football and wrestling. In fact, ESPN profiled him in 2010, after the then-12-year-old finished fourth in his weight class in the Southern Maryland Junior Wrestling League.

Webber said at the time that it was his favorite sport, adding, “I like using my strength and being fit.”

“Sometimes when I watch my teammates in certain situations I wish I had hands, but I just try to do things my own way,” added the rising seventh grader, who said he wanted to be a priest or a Secret Service agent one day.

Over the years, Webber learned how to write, fish and hunt. Videos on a YouTube account believed to belong to Webber show him firing guns using his upper arms. He wrote in a 2023 Today piece that he “even taught myself how to drive by racing go-karts.”

In the piece, Webber said he started playing cornhole — the lawn game in which players throw bean bags at a target on a sloped wooden board — in the backyard with friends, then weekly at his local American Legion.

“I loved it so much, I never missed a Friday,” he wrote.

Webber was crowned Maryland’s best cornhole player in 2020. He explained in the piece he wrote for Today that he doesn’t wear his prosthetics in competition because they don’t allow the same level of sensitivity or control, and has adapted his technique to throw the bags by their corners for more leverage. He said that while others often underestimate him, he hoped his experience would inspire people to “take chances and pursue their dreams” too.

Webber turned pro in the 2021-2022 season, becoming the first quadruple amputee in the history of the American Cornhole League. The governing body, founded in 2015, organizes tournaments that are broadcast on ESPN and CBS Sports.

The league confirmed to NPR on Tuesday that Webber has not been an active participant since late 2024. Nonetheless, it issued a statement acknowledging the allegations and declining to comment on them while proceedings are ongoing.

“This is an extremely serious matter and our thoughts are with all those impacted, including the family and loved ones of Bradrick Michael Wells,” it said.

L.A. Affairs, The Times’ popular dating and romance column about the complications and happily-ever-afters of dating and relationships in L.A., is jumping from the printed word to a Hollywood stage with a live audience.

On April 3, The Times will present L.A. Affairs Live at the Cinegrill Theater at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, 7000 Hollywood Blvd. in Los Angeles. Ten storytellers will have an opportunity to compete against one another and tell their true love and dating stories focused on the night’s theme: “Starting Fresh.” The Times is hosting the event with the Next Fun Thing, which runs L.A. social events from speed dating to kickball tournaments.

Tickets for L.A. Affairs Live are on sale now and can be purchased via the Next Fun Thing’s website for $35 and $50 plus fees.

During the live show, audience members will be able to cast their votes for the night’s best story. The story that gets the highest score will be published as a future L.A. Affairs column. Also, the winning storyteller will receive $400 upon publication of their story.

Here’s what to expect:

• 7 p.m.: Doors open. Guests can order food and special event drinks, find their seats and enjoy music from Kailyn Hype (a.k.a. Times staff writer Kailyn Brown). Attendees can also visit the L.A. Affairs Confessional Booth to share their own stories or pick up event stickers.

• 8 p.m.: Storytelling begins.
• 9:30 p.m.: The winner will be announced, followed by a post-show party. The confessional booth will reopen.

Also, we are featuring matchmaking technology from the Next Fun Thing for singles in attendance. (And, yes, we’ll want to hear all about your potential meet-cutes or first dates resulting from the event in a future L.A. Affairs submission.)

Note: This event will be photographed and recorded for use in our media coverage.

The first essay in Joan Didion’s famous collection Slouching Towards Bethlehem is an odd bit of true crime writing titled “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” It covers the case of Lucille Miller, a “housewife” who was accused of killing her husband in 1964 and convicted in 1965 — and includes Didion’s signature blend of smart, beautiful prose and deadpan disdain.

Didion describes San Bernadino County, Calif., where the murder took place as, among other things, “the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life’s promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers’ school. ‘We were just crazy kids,’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

One of these ambitionless girls, Didion implies, is Lucille Miller, who named her eldest daughter Debra (Debbie for short). In 1964, Debbie was a 14-year-old facing the death of her father and the imminent loss of her mother. Debra Miller has now published her own book The Most Wonderful Terrible Person: A Memoir of Murder in the Golden State with She Writes Press, a hybrid publisher.

Miller opens her memoir with a reflection on her unsolicited relationship with Didion. Miller found it offensive and unsympathetic, writing: “She taught her children to be offended, too, and I hated the essay until I had enough hindsight to see it through new eyes many years later.” Indeed, it is likely this distinction — Miller being related to the subject of one of the most famous literary essayists’ essays — that will prompt many people to pick up the book, although those looking for a Didionesque narrative will be disappointed, as there is not an ounce of cynicism in it.

Instead, The Most Wonderful Terrible Person is a deeply sincere, if sometimes jumbled, reckoning with a life gone off its already rickety rails. Miller’s home life before her father’s death and her mother’s imprisonment was far from picture perfect. Born in Guam where her father, then a military dentist, was stationed, Miller’s parents first relocated to Japan and then to Oregon before finally moving to Southern California. One disturbing anecdote from those early years involves a crying 5-year-old Miller telling her father that her beloved dog, Shep, was too enthusiastic and knocked her down; “Out of ‘love for me,’” Miller writes, “my father gets his shotgun, takes Shep out back, and shoots him… I understood that something awful happened to Shep and it was my fault.”

Both of Miller’s parents were physically abusive — and their parents, she learns, were too — but where her father was largely emotionally distant, her mother was more unpredictable with her affections. Lucille ran hot and cold, sometimes telling her daughter that she preferred raising her younger siblings because they were boys, and other times taking her out on shopping sprees and lavishing her with affection.

The defining event of Miller’s youth, though, is her father’s death and her mother’s trial and imprisonment. The kids weren’t allowed to see their mother for a while after she first went to jail, and when they finally did and asked her when they’d all be able to go home, she told them: “As soon as this is all over.”

“‘This,’” Miller writes, “came to mean a lot of things, the unspoken things. That day, ‘this’ meant legal proceedings. Later, it meant the allegation of murder, and later still, a trial. Those abstractions didn’t mean anything to us yet. Each ‘this’ was a component unto itself. ‘This’ went on and on. It was easier not to call anything by its name, which made it too real, too unbearable. This was momentary, doable. Anybody could do this for a while.”

Not talking about what was really going on became, or perhaps already had been, a pattern in the family. Miller writes about the events that followed: how she and her brothers helped smuggle drugs, alcohol, and makeup into the prison Lucille was sent to; how they moved around a lot between different family members and friends, often separated from one another and from their baby sister who was born shortly after Lucille was convicted; how they the siblings all began using drugs and alcohol to cope and struggled with substance use disorders for years. But even though she details these and other troubles both during and after Lucille’s imprisonment, the memoir rarely digs deep into any real analysis of what was going on.

Still, Miller’s book is moving in its rawness, in its ability to lay out how trauma can derail a person’s life without them ever really recognizing it. An especially astute moment is when, following Lucille’s death in 1986, Miller realizes that her mother owed money to each and every one of the people attending her memorial. And still, Miller writes, “They had loved her, been caught in her spell, believed she was innocent of murdering my father, and now that she was gone, they missed her. She had made each one of them believe they were her best friend and that they were the most fascinating, fabulous person in the world. And now here they all were. Who was going to make them feel better than they were now?”

Even someone terrible, Miller recognizes, can be wonderful in some circumstances, to some people; she herself behaved terribly to many, and her regret and grief over her own behavior is palpable. Miller spent the second half of her life teaching English at a girls’ high school in Los Angeles, and although she is now retired, one very much gets the sense that she’s attempted, in paying attention to her students, to atone for some of her own sins. The Most Wonderful Terrible Person is not a confession, exactly, but it is a reckoning.