Billy Joe Aiken, a 56-year-old male from Piedmont, South Carolina, was rooted in the Upstate community long before the September 4, 2022, day that would mark the end of his life. He was born on January 14, 1966, and in adulthood made a home in Piedmont while maintaining close ties to nearby Greenville. Friends and former classmates later recalled knowing him since their school days at Berea High School, where he graduated in the mid-1980s, and colleagues remembered crossing paths with him again
years later at the Northwest Campus of Greenville Technical College, where his easy conversation and ready smile left an impression on those who worked alongside him.
On that Sunday in early September, deputies with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office were called to a house on Natick Drive after a report that someone inside might be in distress. When they arrived, they found a man in the home who had been shot; investigators quickly confirmed his identity as Billy. The coroner’s office later determined that he had died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and the death investigation was handled as a suicide rather than a homicide, with no indication that another person had fired the weapon or that any crime had been committed against him.
Although first reports focused on the stark facts of the scene, the portrait that emerged of Billy in the days that followed came from the people who knew him best. His mother, Sophia Aiken, had already outlived his father, Willie Clinkscales, and now faced the loss of her son as well. Obituaries from the funeral home in Greenville described a man surrounded by an extensive family network: two daughters, Neecher and Lisette, one living in Greenville and the other in Piedmont; five sisters spread between South Carolina and Virginia; a brother in Greenville; and two grandchildren, Jordan and Mariah, along with “a host” of other relatives and friends who had been part of his daily life.
Those who signed his online guestbook filled in the emotional details that official reports could not. A coworker from Greenville Technical College remembered that seeing him on campus meant being greeted by a cheerful face and a kind word, and wrote that he would be “greatly missed.” A classmate from Berea High School spoke of long conversations that continued well into adulthood, whether they ran into each other with his mother or caught up over the phone, and described how his encouragement and support had continued across the years. Others, including nurses and acquaintances, left brief but heartfelt notes of sympathy and prayer for the Aiken family, signaling how many circles of the community his life had touched.
After his death, Billy’s body was taken to Prisma Health Greenville Memorial Hospital, which is listed on his obituary as the place where he passed. The arrangements were handled by Watkins, Garrett & Woods Mortuary, a longstanding Greenville funeral home, and the family chose to hold a private service, closed to the public and reserved only for those closest to him. In the wider community, his name was quietly added to online memorials of people lost to gunfire in Piedmont, a somber entry among many, but for his family the loss was deeply personal: a father, son, brother, and grandfather gone suddenly, leaving behind two daughters, young grandchildren, and an extended family tasked with carrying his memory forward in the absence of any criminal suspect or courtroom verdict to fix the blame on anyone but the man they loved.
