On the night of October 21, 2019, Patrick Jenkins, a 21-year-old Black man from Timmonsville, South Carolina, was shot in a residential area on Harkless Court, a small street in the community just off Highway 76. The shooting happened around 9:55 p.m., shattering what would otherwise have been an ordinary Monday evening in the quiet town. Neighbors later told reporters that officers from the Timmonsville Police Department and the Florence County Sheriff’s Office converged on the scene as the
emergency unfolded, their arrival marking the latest in a string of violent incidents that had begun to unsettle the community that fall.
When first responders reached Patrick, he was still alive and was rushed from Harkless Court to a nearby hospital in Florence County. Despite the efforts of medical staff, he did not survive his injuries and was pronounced dead at the hospital a short time later. The Florence County coroner formally identified him the next day as Patrick Jenkins, 21, of Timmonsville, confirming that he had been the victim of the late-night shooting on Harkless Court. His body was then scheduled to be sent to the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston for an autopsy, a standard step meant to document the exact cause and manner of death in a homicide investigation.
In the days that followed, news of Patrick’s death spread through local media and memorial sites, where he was remembered as a young man whose life had been cut short by gun violence. Online tributes described friends and relatives lighting virtual candles and leaving messages of love and grief, turning his name from a brief line in a police report into the center of a shared mourning space. At the same time, coverage of the shooting highlighted the broader context: it was one of several shootings that had occurred in and around Timmonsville since early October, and residents told reporters they were alarmed by the sudden surge in violence in a town that was not used to such frequent gunfire.
For investigators, the case quickly became part of a larger effort to understand and stem the violence in the area. Timmonsville’s police chief acknowledged that officers were in the early stages of their work and could not provide many details, while the Florence County coroner and sheriff’s office emphasized that the deadly shootings that night remained under active investigation. Public statements in the weeks immediately after the crime did not mention any arrests or publicly identify a suspect in Patrick’s killing, and available records continue to describe the case in terms of an ongoing investigation rather than a resolved prosecution, leaving his family and community without publicly reported answers about who was responsible for taking his life.
