On the afternoon of August 5, 2021, Preston Hickman Sr., 64, a Black man, was killed in a shooting in the Syracuse community of Darlington County, South Carolina. Reports described the violence unfolding around early afternoon along Philadelphia Street and near Syracuse Community Road, where deputies and emergency crews converged and cordoned off the area with crime-scene tape around a home as neighbors spoke of hearing gunshots followed by sirens.
The coroner, J.
Todd Hardee, identified Hickman at the scene and said Hickman died there. In the same incident, a woman was shot and taken to the hospital; early coverage said little about the woman’s condition beyond confirming the injury and transport for treatment. At first, authorities emphasized that the case was still being pieced together, with investigators from the Darlington County Sheriff’s Office working alongside the coroner’s office and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division.
In the days after the shooting, local reporting noted that an autopsy was scheduled as investigators tried to determine exactly what happened and why. The public information available at that stage focused on the where and when—an afternoon shooting in the Syracuse community—more than the backstory, leaving the community with the uneasy quiet that follows a sudden death and a wounded survivor.
A week later, authorities announced a break in the case: two juveniles were taken into custody on August 13 in connection with the shooting. One juvenile faced a murder charge as well as attempted murder, armed robbery, and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime; the second juvenile was charged as an accessory after the fact. Because both suspects were juveniles, their names were not released publicly.
Beyond those arrests and charges, publicly available reporting on the case centered on the continuing investigation rather than detailing a public trial or conviction, and the agencies involved continued to treat it as an active matter. In the aftermath, Hickman was remembered in an obituary as a Darlington County resident with deep roots in the area, born July 19, 1957, and known by affectionate nicknames within the family—another life story abruptly intersected by gunfire on a summer afternoon in the Syracuse community.
