John Richard Taylor, a 30-year-old Black man from Greenville, South Carolina, spent his final afternoon on May 19, 2020, in a modest residential complex on Haughty Court, where an argument between two men spiraled suddenly and violently out of control. According to the Greenville County Coroner’s Office, the dispute escalated into a physical confrontation that ended when Taylor was shot several times during the struggle, leaving him critically wounded on the pavement as deputies and medics
rushed to the scene.
The shooting happened just before 3 p.m., drawing Greenville County deputies to the quiet cul-de-sac, where they found Taylor gravely injured. He was quickly transported to Greenville Memorial Hospital, part of the Prisma Health system, but the damage from multiple gunshot wounds was already immense. Despite emergency treatment, he died a few hours later, just after 7:30 that evening, his death recorded as the result of gunshot wounds he suffered in the altercation on Haughty Court.
Even as word of his death spread, investigators were already closing in on what had happened in those final minutes. The Greenville County Sheriff’s Office stated that the shooting stemmed from a fight between Taylor and another man, and that investigators were interviewing an individual believed to be directly involved in the incident. They emphasized that they were not actively searching for additional suspects, suggesting that the person they were speaking with may have been the shooter and had remained available to authorities from the outset. At that time, the case was described as still under investigation, and there are no publicly available records indicating that formal charges, a trial, or a conviction were ever announced in connection with Taylor’s death, leaving the official outcome of that investigation unclear in the public record.
Behind the brief and clinical language of news releases and coroner’s reports was a young father whose life had been rooted in Greenville. Obituary notices remember him as John Richard Valdiaz “Pooh/Joog/Fathead” Taylor, the son of John Walter Jones and the late Earline Michelle Taylor, a man whose family ties stretched across the city. He left behind two sons, an adoptive grandmother, and three sisters, along with many other relatives and friends who gathered for a graveside service at Resthaven Memorial Gardens at the end of May 2020 to say goodbye. In that setting, far from the flashing lights of Haughty Court, Taylor was remembered not as the subject of a police investigation but as a beloved son, father, brother, and grandson whose story had been cut short in a single violent afternoon.
