On a cold Wednesday night in late December 2020, Tylieke Easterling climbed into a car traveling along the 4000 block of West Palmetto Street, a stretch of Highway 76 in Florence County, South Carolina. Tylieke Easterling, a 19-year-old Black man, had grown up in nearby Darlington after being born in Florence and was still standing at the threshold of adulthood when that short ride turned fatal.
According to investigators, the car’s passengers included 24-year-old Raeshawn Shaquille Lawson of Florence. At some point during the ride, Lawson handled a handgun inside the vehicle. Detectives later alleged that he pointed and “presented” the weapon in the direction of Easterling while riding as a passenger. In that moment of reckless bravado or carelessness, the gun discharged. The single, unintended shot tore through the quiet of the December night and left Easterling mortally wounded in the car. Emergency responders and the Florence County coroner’s office would later confirm that he had been killed in the shooting on the night of Wednesday, December 23, 2020.
News of the shooting spread quickly through Florence County. The incident, classified as a fatal shooting along Highway 76, drew the attention of the Florence County Sheriff’s Office, which opened a homicide investigation. Within hours, Lawson had been identified by authorities as the man responsible for handling the gun that killed Easterling. Rather than treating the case as a simple accident, investigators pursued criminal charges, concluding that Lawson’s actions in pointing the firearm at another person rose to the level of criminal negligence. Florence County officials announced that Lawson had been arrested and formally charged with involuntary manslaughter, a felony count that acknowledges a killing without intent but rooted in reckless behavior. No other suspects were publicly identified, and the narrative from law enforcement focused entirely on Lawson’s role as the sole person accused in Easterling’s death.
Publicly available reports from the time describe the case in terms of that single devastating mistake: a gun drawn inside a moving vehicle, a trigger pulled or jostled when it should never have been touched. The charge of involuntary manslaughter signaled that investigators believed the shooting to be unintentional, but nonetheless a crime. Local coverage does not clearly record the later stages of the case—there is no widely accessible record of a trial, plea, or sentence in the years that followed—but the initial charging documents and news reports depict Lawson as a young man whose split-second decision to brandish a firearm cost someone else his life and left two families facing a lifetime of consequences.
While investigators worked through the legal process, Easterling’s family was left to prepare a funeral in the middle of a pandemic winter. Obituaries and memorial notices describe a young man known to loved ones as “Ty,” born on October 7, 2001, in Florence and raised in Darlington. He had attended Darlington High School, where he was remembered as an honor student, and he was part of a wide, interwoven network of parents, siblings, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends who filled the condolence pages with grief and disbelief.
At the end of December, mourners gathered at Faith Memorial Gardens for a graveside service, standing masked and distanced around his final resting place as required by the public-health rules of the time. The brief announcements of the service are stark—just the time, the place, and his name—but between the lines is the image of a family trying to say goodbye outdoors on a winter afternoon, adapting rituals of farewell to the realities of 2020. Online memorials, including national listings of gun-violence victims, would later mark his loss among thousands of others, noting that his life ended in Florence just as adulthood was beginning.
