Randolph M. Neville Jr. was a 22-year-old Black man from Georgetown, South Carolina, whose life ended in the early morning darkness of March 26, 2021. On that Friday, just before dawn, the quiet Pawleys Island community was interrupted by gunfire on Annie Rainey Lane, a small stretch of road off Waverly and Martin Luther King in the traditionally close-knit Waccamaw Neck area.
Calls flooded into 911 reporting shots fired, and what had started as just another night in a coastal community quickly turned into a crime scene that would leave a family grieving and investigators searching for answers.
When deputies from the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office arrived, they were told that a car had already left the scene carrying a wounded man. Officers soon located the vehicle and stopped it; inside, they found Neville suffering from gunshot wounds. On that roadside, first responders tried to stabilize him before he was rushed for further treatment. Despite those efforts, he would not survive. Official reports later confirmed that he died from his injuries at Tidelands Waccamaw Community Hospital in nearby Murrells Inlet.
In the hours that followed, authorities formally identified the victim as Randolph M. Neville Jr, 22, of Oxford Lane in Georgetown. Local news accounts described how the shooting happened shortly before 5 a.m. at or near an establishment on Annie Rainey Lane, turning what should have been an ordinary early-morning hour into a moment of chaos and fear for those who lived nearby. Deputies secured the area, processed the scene, and began interviewing witnesses, trying to piece together why Neville had been shot and who was responsible.
While law enforcement worked the case, Neville’s family and friends moved through the rituals of grief. Obituaries and funeral notices recorded the bare facts of his life—born in 1998, raised in Georgetown, remembered by those who loved him. Services were arranged by Wilds Funeral Home, with a public viewing on April 2, 2021, and a graveside service the next day at First Calvary Memorial Gardens Cemetery. Online memorials and candle pages marked his passing, showing that behind the brief lines of a police report was a young man whose absence left a permanent gap in a family and a community.
From the beginning, investigators emphasized that the case was active and that they were seeking information from anyone who might have seen or heard something that morning. Statements from local authorities made clear that there was no suspect in custody in the days immediately following the shooting, and public appeals repeatedly urged witnesses to contact the sheriff’s office or text tips to designated numbers. Over four years later, publicly available records and news archives still reflect the same unresolved status: the investigation into the killing of Randolph Neville remains open, with no widely reported arrest, named suspect, criminal charges, trial, or conviction connected to his death.
In the absence of closure, the story of that morning on Annie Rainey Lane has settled into a painful kind of limbo. The official language—“the investigation is ongoing”—has lingered long after the crime-scene tape came down. For Neville’s loved ones, the memory of a young man taken at 22 is intertwined with an unanswered question that still hangs over Pawleys Island: who pulled the trigger in the darkness just before dawn, and why no one has yet been brought to account.
