Isaiah Joshua Allen, a 23-year-old Black man from Columbia, South Carolina, grew up moving between Jacksonville, Florida, where he was born in December 1996, and the public schools of Duval County and Richland County. He left high school but later returned to his studies and earned his GED in 2016, a milestone his family remembered as a turning point that showed his determination to build a more stable life.
Loved ones described him as deeply devoted to family, a young man who poured himself into the people around him, and a published poet whose writing gave him a way to make sense of the world.
On the night of May 26, 2020, Isaiah went to the 1600 block of Longcreek Drive in northwest Columbia, in the St. Andrews area just off Broad River Road near Interstate 20. Around 9:20 p.m., deputies from the Richland County Sheriff’s Department were called to reports of gunfire. When they arrived, they found Isaiah outside on the ground, unresponsive and suffering from multiple gunshot wounds. Despite efforts at the scene, he was pronounced dead there rather than at a hospital. The Richland County coroner later confirmed that he died of multiple gunshot wounds to his body, and the shooting was quickly classified as a homicide.
In the hours after the shooting, the apartment-lined stretch of Longcreek Drive emptied out in a rush of fear. Investigators later said there had been several people outside when the gunfire erupted, but many scattered as patrol cars and crime-scene tape moved in. Within two days, the sheriff’s department and local media released surveillance images of two men who had been in the area at the time. Authorities carefully called them “possible witnesses,” stressing that they might have seen or heard something crucial, and asked the public to help identify them. The appeals went out alongside repeated reminders that tips to Midlands Crime Stoppers could be made anonymously and might lead to a reward if they helped bring about an arrest.
As detectives followed leads, the case moved from a call for witnesses to the identification of a suspect. Less than a month after the shooting, on June 22, 2020, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department announced that a 23-year-old man, Jamil Lonnell Thompson Jr., had been arrested in New Jersey in connection with the killing. According to news reports, Thompson Jr. was taken into custody there for the May 26 shooting on Longcreek Drive and was accused of murdering Isaiah. He then faced extradition and prosecution in South Carolina, where the case was treated as a violent felony homicide.
In the years that followed, the case left the headlines but continued through the courts. Records from the South Carolina Department of Corrections show that Thompson Jr. eventually entered state prison custody in May 2023 after being convicted in Richland County of voluntary manslaughter, with the indictment listed under case number 20GS404091 and a start date in June 2020. He received a 23-year adult straight sentence for that offense, classified as a violent crime, with no parole eligibility and a projected release date of January 5, 2040. The corrections records tie him directly to the Longcreek Drive homicide, and Gun Violence Archive lists him as the subject-suspect in the shooting that killed Isaiah.
For Isaiah’s family, though, the legal milestones did little to soften the loss. On memorial pages devoted to gun violence victims and in the obituary prepared by his loved ones, he is remembered not as a case file but as a youngest son and a gentle, funny presence whose empathy drew people in. His mother wrote of struggling to comprehend how someone could “gun down” her child when he had no weapon, and of feeling that part of her died the night she saw him lying on the ground. Friends and relatives remembered him as loving, passionate, and humorous, the kind of person whose absence is felt in the silences of ordinary days as much as in the formal ceremonies held in his name. Even with a conviction and a long sentence for the man held responsible for his death, the story of Isaiah Joshua Allen remains, for those who knew him, a story of potential cut short and a life that continues to be mourned.
