In the small town of Ridge Spring in Saluda County, South Carolina, James Patrick Kinard, a 39-year-old Black man, was living an unremarkable life in a community of only a few hundred residents when violence found him. On the night of October 19, 2018, gunfire shattered the quiet around the Hazzard Circle area. When law enforcement arrived, they found Kinard mortally wounded from a gunshot, and what had been an ordinary evening in a rural neighborhood instantly became a homicide scene that
would haunt the town for years to come.
Local officers quickly realized the killing was no random act. Investigators from the Ridge Spring Police Department received word from a witness who reported seeing two men near Kinard shortly before the shooting, known in the neighborhood only by their nicknames, “Man” and “DJ.” The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division was called in to help process the scene and build a case, but despite an early sense that there were suspects and a motive, the investigation did not immediately produce arrests. For years, Kinard's death sat in that painful space between rumor and proof, with his killing remembered locally while the official file remained unresolved.
The breakthrough came when investigators began reworking the case and turned back to those early street names. In a SLED photo lineup, the same witness who had seen “Man” and “DJ” near Kinard identified “Man” as 24-year-old Earl Eugene Valentine Jr. and “DJ” as 30-year-old Derrick Cyrus Jr. As agents retraced the trail, they uncovered physical evidence that had gone unnoticed in the wider public conversation: a fired. 38-caliber casing retrieved from a trash can outside Cyrus's residence. Forensic work later showed that the bullet which killed Kinard was consistent with a. 38 special or. 357-caliber round, tying the cartridge in Cyrus's trash directly to the type of weapon used in the shooting.
Witness testimony added an even darker dimension to the story. According to warrant affidavits described by reporters, more than one person told investigators that Valentine had admitted to killing Kinard. One account went further, saying Valentine believed Kinard was working with the police, and that the shooting was an act of retaliation for suspected cooperation with law enforcement. Another source told authorities that Cyrus had been saying Valentine was the one who pulled the trigger, reinforcing the picture of a close associate helping shield the gunman after the fact. These statements, together with the ballistic evidence and photo identifications, shifted the case from a long-dormant small-town mystery into an active prosecution.
In February 2024, SLED formally charged Earl Eugene Valentine Jr. with murder and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime in connection with Kinard's death. Not long afterward, Derrick Cyrus Jr. was charged with accessory after the fact to murder, with investigators alleging that he provided aid, shelter, or assistance to Valentine following the shooting. Both men were booked into the Saluda County Detention Center, finally putting names and faces to the shadowy figures who had been whispered about in Ridge Spring since 2018. Public records and news reports describe the case moving into the court system after those arrests, but as of the most recent coverage, no verdict in Kinard's killing had been publicly reported, leaving the question of ultimate accountability still unresolved.
Valentine's name, however, appears elsewhere in the recent history of Saluda County violence. In a separate case from November 2022, he was tried and found guilty of murdering 22-year-old Zonnie Cyrus near a pond on Hi-land Farm Road in the Monetta area. A jury convicted him of murder and a weapons charge, and a judge sentenced him to 55 years in prison. That conviction does not legally decide what happened on Hazzard Circle in 2018, but it casts a long shadow over the allegations in Kinard's case, suggesting a pattern of lethal violence that now stretches across multiple shootings and multiple families in the same rural county.
Today, Kinard's name appears in databases that quietly list those lost to gun violence, recording that he was 39 years old when he was shot to death on a fall night in Ridge Spring. The town around him remains small and tightly knit, the kind of place where a single killing can echo for years. With accused shooters finally identified and charged but the final chapter of the courtroom story still unwritten, his case sits at a painful crossroads: no longer unsolved, yet not fully finished, a reminder of how long justice can take to reach a quiet street in a small South Carolina town.
