Darris Anthony Brooks, a 42-year-old Black man from Greenwood, South Carolina, spent most of his life in the community that surrounded Florida Avenue, where family and routine gave shape to his days. Born in nearby Abbeville, he was the son of Mary Ann Brooks Saxon and the late Danny Ray Brooks, and had settled at 210 Florida Avenue, a modest address that kept him close to relatives and lifelong friends.
Those who remembered him publicly described a man deeply rooted in Greenwood, a working father and grandfather who put in his hours at Greenwood Plating Company and had come up through local schools like Emerald Junior and Emerald High before going on to Piedmont Technical College.
In the early morning hours of Sunday, June 19, 2022, the quiet of Florida Avenue was broken by gunfire. Around 3 a.m., police officers were called to a home on the street, where they found Brooks lying in the front yard, unresponsive, with multiple gunshot wounds. Neighbors awoke to flashing lights and the sound of first responders working frantically over him on the grass. He was rushed to Self Regional Healthcare, the same hospital that had served generations of Greenwood families. Shortly before 4 a.m., the Greenwood County Coroner’s Office was called to the emergency room, and a short time later Brooks was pronounced dead. The coroner identified him by name and confirmed that he had been shot several times, and the death was immediately treated as a homicide. An autopsy was scheduled for the following week, a formal step that underscored that what had happened on Florida Avenue was now a matter for detectives and courts.
In the days that followed, there were few public details about why Brooks had been targeted or what had led up to the shooting. Greenwood police acknowledged that there was little physical evidence at the scene, leaving investigators to lean heavily on witness accounts and whatever tips the community might provide. Florida Avenue, usually just a lived-in street of family homes, suddenly carried the weight of a crime scene, and residents who had known Brooks now watched patrol cars and detectives move in and out, hoping someone had seen or heard enough to help. For a time, the killing hung in that uncertain space that families of homicide victims dread: everyone knew who had died, but no one outside the investigation yet knew who had pulled the trigger or why.
Weeks later, the tension around the case finally broke. On August 4, 2022, Greenwood police announced that an arrest had been made in connection with the June 19 shooting. Investigators said that it was the steady flow of information from the public that had given them the leads they needed. They named 23-year-old Quintavious Devonta Johnson as the suspect and said he was accused of shooting Brooks at the Florida Avenue home in the early morning hours of that June Sunday. Johnson, according to police, had become the focus of the case as officers pieced together witness statements and tips, building a picture of who had been present and what had unfolded in the dark outside Brooks’s residence.
That same day, Johnson was booked into the Greenwood County detention system. Jail records show him listed as a 23-year-old Black man, charged with murder and with possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, reflecting prosecutors’ belief that the shooting on Florida Avenue was deliberate and criminal rather than accidental or defensive. The charges meant that Brooks’s death had moved from an unsolved killing into the formal machinery of the court system, with Johnson facing the prospect of a murder trial and a potential decades-long sentence if convicted.
Public reporting, however, does not clearly follow the case beyond those initial charges. News accounts focus on the night of the shooting, the shock to the neighborhood, and the eventual arrest brought about by community cooperation, but they grow quiet when it comes to what happened later in the courtroom—whether Johnson went to trial, whether a plea was offered or accepted, and what a jury or judge ultimately decided. What remains visible in the record is the arc from a Greenwood man’s ordinary life on Florida Avenue, to a burst of gunfire that ended it in the early hours of June 19, 2022, and finally to a named suspect facing a murder charge, with the rest of the story largely confined to files and hearing rooms that have not been widely reported beyond Greenwood County.
