Alton Jermaine Hair Jr. was a 19-year-old Black man from Orangeburg, South Carolina, remembered by family and friends as “AJ,” a young man whose life was just beginning to take shape when it was cut short by gunfire on December 27, 2021. He grew up in the Orangeburg area and was laid to rest after services held at Simmons Funeral Home and Crematory Chapel, with burial at St.
Stephens United Methodist Church Cemetery, a traditional farewell that underscored how deeply rooted he was in his community and how suddenly that community found itself mourning a son.
On the night he was killed, AJ was one of four teenage boys who drove together to a location near Cordova in Orangeburg County to meet someone about buying a gun. They stayed in their car while two males approached, one coming up on the driver’s side and the other on the passenger’s side. What began as a tense but seemingly routine transaction quickly turned ominous as one of the teens and one of the men outside the car talked about the scope attached to the firearm they were there to see. In an instant the mood shifted: one of the men outside allegedly barked, “Give it up!” and the quiet back-and-forth became a robbery at gunpoint. Shots rang out into the car. When the gunfire stopped, AJ had been mortally wounded and would not survive. A 17-year-old riding with him had been shot in the arm, suffering a serious injury that would mark him long after the physical wounds healed, while the two other teens managed to escape without being physically hurt but with the memory of the ambush burned in. According to investigators, what was supposed to be a purchase had turned into a deadly stickup, the kind of sudden violence that leaves more questions than answers.
In the weeks and months that followed, the Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office investigated the shooting as a homicide tied to a robbery, describing the case as open and active. Detectives pieced together accounts from the surviving teens and physical evidence from the scene, ultimately obtaining warrants for an 18-year-old named Deamonta Saquandra Davis of St. Matthews. The warrants charged him with murder in AJ’s death, three counts of attempted murder for the surviving teenagers in the car, and four counts of possessing a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. Those warrants were served at the Orangeburg County Detention Center, where Davis was already being held on an unrelated killing, meaning that the suspect in AJ’s shooting was not brought in after a dramatic manhunt but quietly linked to the case while in custody on another murder charge. The announcement that someone had been charged brought a measure of movement but not closure; AJ’s family still had no trial date to pin their hopes on, only the knowledge that a name and face had been attached to the violence that took his life.
The separate case that first landed Davis behind bars involved another deadly shooting in Orangeburg County barely two months after AJ’s death. On February 22, 2022, deputies were called to a home on Woodridge Lane, where they found two men with gunshot wounds; one man was dead and another was rushed to the hospital. In that investigation, authorities accused Davis, then 18, of killing one victim and wounding the other during the attack at the house. Obituary records from Orangeburg show that 43-year-old John B. Pinckney died there on February 22, 2022, the same date as the Woodridge Lane homicide, and warrants in that case have been described as accusing Davis of killing Pinckney and injuring a 22-year-old man. Together, the Woodridge Lane shooting and AJ’s killing left Davis facing multiple counts of murder and attempted murder, as well as weapons charges that, if they ever result in convictions, could keep him in prison for life. For AJ’s loved ones, though, the legal language—charges, counts, potential sentences—sits in the shadow of more personal images: a teenager known as AJ, a nickname repeated on memorial pages and in condolences, whose candles on online remembrance sites continue to be lit as the criminal case connected to his death moves slowly through the system, still waiting for a final accounting.
