Clifton James Singletary was a 45-year-old Black man from Sumter County, South Carolina, known to those close to him by nicknames like “Flip” and “Sporty Black.” He was born on March 28, 1977, the son of James Singletary and the late Virginia June Singletary, and as an adult he built his life in the same part of the state where he’d grown up. He married Katherine Terrell Pringle Singletary and maintained strong ties to his family and community.
In December 2022, his life was centered between Sumter and nearby Columbia, with relatives and friends gathering at a Brown Street address in Sumter that police would later identify as his home.
On the night of Thursday, December 15, 2022, shots rang out in the Warren Street area of Sumter, prompting a report of gunfire to police around 8:15 p.m. Investigators would later say that Singletary had been shot multiple times outside a building on Warren Street. Wounded but still able to move, he walked from the shooting scene to a nearby hotel on Broad Street, where he met friends who rushed him to Prisma Health Tuomey hospital. From there, because of the severity of his injuries, he was transferred to Prisma Health Richland Hospital in Columbia. Despite medical efforts, he died at the Columbia hospital that same night, and the Sumter County Coroner’s Office notified his family of his death.
In the immediate aftermath, the case was a mystery. Sumter police announced that they did not yet know who had shot Singletary or why. Detectives appealed to the public for help, emphasizing that he had been shot several times and that his final walk to the Broad Street hotel had been a crucial part of the timeline they were trying to reconstruct. A reward of up to $5,000 was offered for information leading to an arrest, and the case was listed among the region’s gun homicides, with online memorials describing him as “lost to gun violence” in Columbia on December 15, 2022. While family members prepared for his funeral at Salem Chapel & Heritage Center in Sumter and laid him to rest in a local cemetery, investigators quietly followed leads that emerged from tips and interviews.
Two months later, a breakthrough came. On February 15, 2023, Sumter police announced that information gathered in the investigation had led to an arrest. Officers had taken 41-year-old John Ambrose Westley, formerly of Sumter, into custody on an unrelated warrant. During his time in custody, Westley was interviewed by detectives and, according to their account, admitted to shooting Singletary. Investigators said they believed the violence began with an argument between Westley and a friend of Singletary outside the Warren Street hotel on the night of December 15; in the course of that dispute, Westley was accused of opening fire and hitting Singletary multiple times.
Following his alleged confession, Westley was charged with murder, possession of a weapon during a violent crime, and unlawful carry of a weapon. He was booked into the Sumter County Detention Center to await further court proceedings. Public reporting on the case focuses on the initial shooting, the community’s grief, and the arrest that followed; available online records do not detail later stages such as a trial or conviction, leaving the legal aftermath beyond the arrest largely undocumented in open sources. What does emerge clearly is the arc of the case: a December night punctuated by gunfire on Warren Street, a desperate walk to safety that ended in a Columbia hospital, and, months later, an arrest that linked the killing to a man who, according to police, ultimately acknowledged his role in the death of Clifton James Singletary.
