Kevin John Anthony Backus, a 34-year-old man from Florence, South Carolina, was remembered online as “lil bolo,” described by those who loved him as quiet, observant, and “self made,” with hundreds of digital candles lit in his memory after his death. In photos shared to memorial pages he appears relaxed and smiling, the kind of presence that suggests a man rooted in his neighborhood and family, unaware that an ordinary November weekend in 2019 would be his last.
On the afternoon
of Saturday, November 23, 2019, Florence police were dispatched after reports of shots fired, first to Sumter Street and then, more specifically, to the 400 block of Curry Lane. Officers arrived to find a wounded victim and quickly realized the call was not about random gunfire but a targeted shooting. Emergency medical personnel rushed Backus from Curry Lane to a local hospital, but despite their efforts he did not survive. The county coroner later identified the victim as Kevin John Anthony Backus, 34, of Florence, and his body was scheduled for autopsy at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston. That night, word of the killing spread through the city and across social media, where friends and relatives tried to make sense of the sudden loss.
In the immediate aftermath, the Florence Police Department treated the case as an open homicide investigation and released only basic details: the approximate time of the shooting, the streets involved, confirmation that one person had died, and a plea for anyone with information to contact detectives. For several days, the official narrative remained sparse, with no public account of what had led Backus to Curry Lane that evening or what had unfolded in the moments before the gunfire. Behind the scenes, however, investigators were interviewing witnesses, tracing movements around the neighborhood, and piecing together who had been present when the shots were fired.
By the end of that week, police announced they had charged three men in connection with the deadly shooting. The department stated that the killing occurred on Curry Lane the previous weekend and formally linked the case to Backus by name. Two of the men, Satwaun Wallace Henryhand and Tyquan Jamar Johnson, were each charged with murder and conspiracy, indicating that investigators believed not only that they were involved in killing Backus but that the act was the result of advance planning rather than a spontaneous dispute. A third man, Victor Bernard Johnson Jr., was charged with conspiracy and accessory before the fact to a felony, suggesting that police viewed him as someone who helped set events in motion without necessarily pulling a trigger.
The sequence of arrests unfolded over several days. According to police, warrants for conspiracy and accessory-before-the-fact charges were first served on Victor Bernard Johnson Jr. Officers later took Satwaun Wallace Henryhand into custody and charged him with murder and conspiracy, and by mid-week they had also arrested Tyquan Jamar Johnson on the same two charges of murder and conspiracy. All three men were booked into the Florence County Detention Center, where officials said they would be held without bond until a circuit court judge could consider their cases because of the seriousness of the allegations. Police did not publicly release a detailed motive, only noting that additional information about how and why Backus was targeted had not yet been made available.
In the years that followed, the men accused in Backus’s death continued to appear in the news, though in cases technically separate from the Curry Lane homicide. While out on bond for the November 2019 murder charge, Tyquan Jamar Johnson was arrested during a major drug investigation in Florence in May 2022; officers executing a search warrant reported seizing more than 500 grams of suspected methamphetamine pills, marijuana, several handguns—some listed as stolen—and cash. That drug case went to trial, and in early 2024 a circuit court judge sentenced Johnson to twenty-five years in prison for trafficking methamphetamine and an additional five years for possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, after a jury found him guilty. Prosecutors emphasized that Johnson remained a dangerous figure and noted that he still had a pending murder charge from November 2019, with no announced trial date on that homicide at the time of the report.
Another of the men tied to the case, Victor Bernard Johnson Jr., surfaced in federal court records in 2022, when a grand jury indicted him for possessing a firearm and ammunition as a prohibited felon based on an alleged incident on December 25, 2021. That federal charge did not explicitly name Backus or the Curry Lane shooting, but it underscored that Johnson, like Johnson’s co-defendant Tyquan, remained under close scrutiny from law enforcement long after the night Backus was killed.
Publicly available reporting does not record a completed murder trial or a set of final verdicts in the killing of Kevin John Anthony Backus. The most recent coverage notes that at least one defendant still carried a pending murder charge tied to the November 2019 homicide, with prosecutors declining to specify when that case would reach a jury. Meanwhile, the online memorial to Backus continues to gather candles and comments, suggesting that for his family and community the story of what happened on Curry Lane is not just a matter of court dockets and charging documents but an open wound—one in which a quiet, self-made man’s life ended suddenly, and full answers about why remain out of reach.
