Akeen A. Sloan, a 30-year-old man from Greenville, South Carolina, spent the final hours of his life in the quiet early morning of Saturday, December 12, 2020, at a building along Anderson Road on the outskirts of town. Just before 3 a.m., Greenville County deputies were called to the address after reports of gunfire. When they arrived, they found Sloan gravely wounded.
He was rushed to a nearby hospital, where doctors could do no more; the county coroner later confirmed he had died from his injuries and publicly released his name and age, tying his death to the shooting that had shattered the stillness of the night on Anderson Road.
News of the killing spread quickly through Greenville that day, but at first investigators had few answers. The sheriff’s office described the case as a death investigation, and early reports emphasized that there was no suspect information to share. Sloan’s name joined the growing list of people “lost to gun violence” on online memorial pages, which recorded that he died in Greenville on December 12, 2020. While deputies pieced together what had happened in the pre-dawn darkness, his family was left to absorb the sudden loss of a son, fiancé, father, and relative.
Within a day, detectives announced a major development. According to Greenville County Sheriff’s Office spokesman Lt. Ryan Flood, investigators determined that an altercation had taken place inside the Anderson Road building in the moments before the shooting. During that confrontation, one of the people present, 28-year-old James Thomas Maddison III, left the building and went to his vehicle. Deputies later said that Maddison retrieved an assault rifle from the car, returned outside, and shot Sloan in the parking lot.
That same weekend, members of the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office Fugitive Apprehension Specialized Investigations Team tracked Maddison to Easley. He was arrested there on Saturday evening and taken to the Greenville County Detention Center. Authorities announced that he had been charged with murder, possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, and possession of a firearm or ammunition by a violent felon. The charges painted a picture of a confrontation that escalated with terrifying speed—from a dispute inside a building to a deadly shooting carried out with a rifle in the parking lot.
As the case worked its way through the courts, Sloan’s name continued to surface in local news. In June 2021, deputies revealed that Maddison, who remained in custody at the detention center, had been charged in a separate homicide—the March 2020 killing of James Rashad Forward in Piedmont. In that report, officials noted that Maddison was already jailed on a murder charge stemming from Sloan’s death on December 12, 2020, linking him publicly and repeatedly to the Anderson Road homicide as the accused shooter.
State corrections records later showed that the case against Maddison ended with serious convictions. The South Carolina Department of Corrections lists him as an inmate serving an adult straight sentence for murder—31 years—along with a separate five-year sentence for involuntary manslaughter. Both offenses are recorded with a start date of December 12, 2020, in Greenville County, the same date and jurisdiction as Sloan’s killing. Maddison was admitted to state prison in July 2023 and is not eligible for parole, with a projected release date in December 2051, indicating that the Anderson Road shooting ultimately led to a long prison term after the court proceedings concluded.
While investigators and prosecutors focused on charges, hearings, and sentences, Sloan’s family moved through a very different set of rituals. His obituary, published by a Greenville funeral home, remembered him under the name Akeem Angelo “King/Mr. Baby” Sloan and noted that he died on December 12, 2020, at Prisma Health in Greenville. It described the loved ones left behind: three young daughters and a son, his aunt who helped raise him, siblings, cousins, and his fiancée. Later that month, relatives and friends gathered at Resthaven Memorial Gardens for a graveside service, standing together at his burial site along Piedmont Highway to say goodbye.
Online memorials and guestbooks kept his story from ending at the cemetery. A page dedicated to him on a national gun-violence remembrance site lists his name, age, date, and place of death, inviting people who knew him to light virtual candles and share memories. Between those quiet remembrances and the stark language of arrest affidavits, press releases, and prison records, the outline of what happened to Akeen A. Sloan comes into focus: a dispute in the early hours of a December morning, a fatal decision to reach for an assault rifle, a life cut short on Anderson Road, and a criminal case that ended with his killer behind bars for decades, even as Sloan’s family continues to live with the absence his death left behind.
