On a warm Monday evening in June 2021, Kendall Terrell Cohen, a 42-year-old man with ties to both Ladson and Johns Island in the Charleston area, drove out along Bohicket Road as daylight faded over the marshes. Sometime after eight o’clock that night, he ended up in a quiet private driveway near the intersection of Bohicket Road and Donnelly Lane, just outside the main offices of Sea Island Habitat for Humanity, an organization better known for building homes than for scenes of violence.
A call to 911 brought deputies from the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office racing to the 2500 block of Bohicket Road around 8:17 p.m., where they found Cohen lying on the ground beside a parked vehicle, suffering from a gunshot wound. He was pronounced dead at the scene; the county coroner later recorded that he died around 8:45 p.m. from that single, fatal injury at the Bohicket and Donnelly intersection.
The setting of his death has lingered in the public record with a kind of tragic irony. The address where deputies first responded, 2545 Bohicket Road, is listed as the Sea Island Habitat for Humanity main office, a place dedicated to providing safe housing and strengthening the surrounding community. On that night, however, the building and its driveway became the backdrop for a sudden act of lethal violence. Deputies arriving at the scene found only Cohen and the vehicle; whoever had fired the shot was already gone. Officials noted that the vehicle he was found near had been parked in a private driveway rather than on the roadway, adding to the sense that this was not a random traffic encounter.
In the days that followed, authorities released only a few key facts. The coroner publicly identified the victim as Kendall Cohen, age 42, and confirmed that his death was the result of a gunshot wound. Local reports described him as a man from Ladson who died on Johns Island, while obituaries and memorials placed him in Johns Island itself, reflecting the close links between those communities in his life. Notices of his passing invited relatives and friends to a celebration of life service at Grace Cathedral in nearby Hollywood, South Carolina, with burial at Bethlehem St. James United Methodist Church on Bohicket Road, not far from where he was killed. Online memorials later recorded that he was “lost to gun violence” on June 21, 2021, and preserved his name alongside other victims in the region.
From the outset, investigators with the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office described Cohen’s death as “suspicious,” effectively treating it as a homicide. Deputies said that an unidentified gunman fled the area after the shooting and that there was no sign of the shooter when they arrived. Public accounts consistently refer to the assailant only as an “unknown gunman,” and officials stressed that detectives were actively investigating. As of the latest available reports, there have been no public announcements of any arrests, no named suspects, and no information about possible motives or circumstances beyond the bare fact that Cohen was shot near the Habitat for Humanity offices and left dying beside a parked vehicle. The absence of follow-up stories about a suspect or charges, even years later, suggests that the case has not led to a publicly reported arrest or conviction and that the person responsible for his killing has not been identified in the public record.
