Jermaine Alan Gipson, a 21-year-old Black man from Greenville, South Carolina, had only recently celebrated his birthday when violence cut his life short. Born on September 16, 1999, he was known to family by the nickname “Maine” and was remembered by those who loved him as amazing and kind-hearted. He was a young father with a daughter, Charmaine, and part of a close-knit family that included his parents, siblings, grandparents, and a “special friend” in Greenville.
In the days after his death, relatives and friends gathered at Watkins, Garrett & Woods Mortuary, where an obituary recounted his ties to Miami and Greenville and announced a funeral service held on October 4, 2020, followed by a private burial, a quiet acknowledgment of how many lives his loss touched.
On the afternoon of September 26, 2020, deputies with the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office were dispatched to the Highland Square Apartments around 12:20 p.m. after reports of a possible gunshot victim at the complex. A short time later, a gunshot victim arrived at a local hospital, where he was pronounced dead. The Greenville County coroner identified him as Jermaine Alan Gipson of Greenville, confirming that he had succumbed to his wounds that same day. Another account notes that he died at St. Francis Hospital Downtown, underscoring how quickly the shooting proved fatal despite efforts to save him. Early statements from the sheriff’s office described the investigation as being in its initial stages and offered few details beyond the fact that he had been mortally wounded at the apartment complex before reaching the hospital.
In the days that followed, investigators began piecing together what had unfolded at Highland Square. According to the Greenville County Sheriff’s Office, their work eventually led them to focus on a man they believed had confronted Gipson during an ongoing dispute. On October 6, 2020, authorities announced that 23-year-old Tyriese Nayquan Robinson of Greenville had been taken into custody in Long Island, New York, in connection with the shooting. Deputies said Robinson was arrested for the shooting death of Jermaine Gipson and charged with murder under a Greenville County arrest warrant. Investigators publicly stated that Robinson and Gipson were familiar with one another and that an ongoing disagreement between them had escalated into gunfire at the apartment complex. Even after the arrest, deputies indicated they were working to identify other individuals who might have been involved and again asked anyone with information about the case to contact Crime Stoppers, suggesting that the confrontation may have unfolded in front of more people than were initially known to investigators.
The case did not end with Robinson’s arrest. Court proceedings in Greenville County led to his conviction for Gipson’s killing and an associated weapons offense. Records from the South Carolina Department of Corrections show that Robinson is serving an adult straight sentence for murder, imposed in Greenville County and beginning on October 12, 2020, along with a separate adult straight sentence for a firearms-related offense listed as “firearms provision,” also tied to Greenville County on the same date. The murder sentence is for 45 years, and the firearms sentence is for 5 years, reflecting the court’s judgment that the use of a weapon in the killing warranted additional punishment.
Those same records indicate that Robinson entered state prison on June 5, 2024, and is currently housed at Lee Correctional Institution. His projected release date is listed as September 30, 2070, with no eligibility for parole or supervised reentry, signaling that the state considers his punishment effectively a decades-long confinement for taking Gipson’s life with a gun. While the legal system moved forward—with charges, an arrest, conviction, and a long sentence—the grief for Gipson’s family remained rooted in that September afternoon in 2020, when a dispute at an apartment complex ended with a young father dying in a hospital and an entire community left to mourn him.
