Huber “John” Flores Lopez, a 21-year-old man from Troutman, North Carolina, had built a busy and hopeful life around work, family, and the future he was planning when he was killed in Greenville, South Carolina, on June 25, 2022. An obituary describes how he was born on June 15, 2001, in Mooresville, North Carolina, and worked side by side with his father at Precision Construction, then headed to a second job in the evenings at Awad Holdings Inc.
From a young age he was determined to support himself and help his mother, working two jobs to buy his first car and contribute to the care of his younger siblings. He spent much of his free time with his longtime girlfriend, Maria Castillo, and the two were said to have mapped out a future together. Family and friends remembered him as someone with an infectious personality who loved to make people laugh, who had a positive outlook and was sure he would succeed. He enjoyed going to the shooting range with friends, flying his drone, traveling to new places and photographing mountain scenery while on jobs, and he took pride in sharing pictures of his carpentry work, a reflection of the intelligence, work ethic, and big dreams those close to him saw every day.
On the night of June 25, 2022, Lopez was in the Woodside community of Greenville, a neighborhood off West 8th Street where his mother and other relatives lived, when the ordinary rhythms of a Saturday evening were broken by gunfire. Around 9:30 p.m., deputies with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched after a call reported a shooting on West 8th Street. When they arrived, they found Lopez lying near the roadway with gunshot wounds; he was pronounced dead at the scene. The Greenville County Coroner later identified him publicly and reported that he had died from multiple gunshot wounds, fixing the time and place of death to that Saturday night in Greenville. Early reports noted that investigators canvassed the area and blocked off portions of the street near a cul-de-sac while they searched for evidence and tried to reconstruct what had happened in the darkness moments before Lopez collapsed.
In the immediate aftermath, authorities released few details beyond the location and basic facts of the killing, and initial statements from the sheriff’s office said there was no information to share about possible suspects. For Lopez’s family, the loss was layered with distance and divided roots: his father and some relatives were in North Carolina, while his mother, Janeth Lopez, and several siblings and one grandmother were living in Greenville, underscoring how his life bridged the two places now joined by tragedy. In remembrance, relatives spoke of a son and brother who helped care for younger siblings, who proudly showed off photos of the places he worked and traveled, and whose life, as one obituary put it plainly, “was taken from us way too soon.”
Within days, however, the investigation shifted from an open manhunt to a case centered on a group of teenagers. By the following Tuesday, the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office announced that four male juveniles had been taken into custody in connection with Lopez’s death. One juvenile was charged with murder, accused of firing the shots that killed him, while three other juveniles were charged with accessory after the fact, alleged to have helped in some way once the shooting was over. Because of their ages, authorities withheld their names and other identifying details.
Reporting on the case also indicated that investigators believed the violence grew out of a dispute among family members on West 8th Street that escalated until a gun was drawn and Lopez was shot, transforming what might have begun as a personal argument into a homicide that rippled through an extended family spread between Greenville and Troutman. Public coverage, however, quickly thins out after the announcement of charges; with all four suspects juveniles, any subsequent court proceedings would largely have taken place behind closed doors, and there is little accessible reporting about trials, plea agreements, or eventual sentences. What remains in the public record is the outline of a young man’s life and the bare facts of the night he was killed: a hardworking son, brother, and partner whose ambitions and everyday joys were cut short on a Greenville street, and a set of unnamed teenage defendants whose fate, like many juvenile cases, disappeared from view even as Lopez’s family continued to grieve.
