Tyson Angelo Anderson was a 19-year-old Black male from the Irmo area of Columbia, South Carolina, remembered by his family as a loving, full-of-spirit young man who lit up every room with his smile. He was born on November 9, 1999, and had earned his GED through Richland School District Five. Those closest to him recalled how he loved sports, especially the New Orleans Saints, and how deeply he cared about music and the people around him.
His funeral program, titled “A Celebration of His Life,” shows him smiling in a suit, the dates “Sunrise November 9, 1999” and “Sunset August 9, 2019” framing his photo, a reminder of how quickly his life was cut short.
On the night of August 8, 2019, the routine quiet of Forest View Circle, a residential street off Broad River Road in the Harbison/Irmo area of Richland County, was broken by gunfire. Around 9 p.m., deputies with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department were dispatched to the 100 block of the street after reports of a shooting. When they arrived, they found three young men suffering from gunshot wounds. All three were initially transported for medical care, and the scene—an ordinary neighborhood cul-de-sac—became a crime scene lit by blue lights and crowded with investigators and worried residents.
As the night wore on, word began to spread about who had been caught in the gunfire. The Richland County Coroner’s Office identified one of the victims as Tyson Anderson, of Beech Branch Drive in Irmo. An autopsy found that he had been shot in the torso; he died from that wound later that night, making him the first fatality from the shooting. Days later, authorities announced that another victim, 18-year-old Carlos LaMarcus Bethel of Irmo, had succumbed to complications from gunshot wounds to the upper body after several days in the hospital. A third man survived his injuries. What began as a triple shooting thus became a double homicide, and Anderson’s death marked one of the county’s early murders for 2019.
In the days following the attack, investigators pieced together what had led to the violence. The Richland County Sheriff’s Department said the incident on Forest View Circle was connected to a drug transaction, and Sheriff Leon Lott later stated publicly that the shooting involved marijuana. At a press conference about the case, Lott framed the killings as part of a broader pattern of guns and drugs pulling teenagers into deadly situations, warning that the combination of guns, drugs, and gangs would put young people “in the cemetery or in the prison.” Even as he noted that the county’s overall murder rate was down compared to the previous year, he pointed to Anderson’s killing and Bethel’s eventual death as painful evidence that a single night’s choices could devastate families and communities.
For nearly two weeks after the shooting, detectives followed leads and interviewed witnesses while the community waited for news of an arrest. That breakthrough came on August 21, 2019, when Sheriff Lott announced that a suspect had been taken into custody out of state. Nineteen-year-old Kevin Duane Greene III was located in Georgia and arrested with the assistance of the U.S. Marshals Service and Richland County’s Fugitive Task Force. Records from Georgia show him booked in Fulton County on a fugitive-from-justice warrant tied to Richland County, confirming that officials were already seeking him in connection with the Forest View Circle investigation. Back in South Carolina, deputies said Greene would face two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder for the shooting that killed Anderson and Bethel and wounded the third man.
The criminal case moved forward over the next two years, ultimately ending with Greene imprisoned in the South Carolina Department of Corrections. State prison records show that in November 2021 he began serving three adult “straight” sentences from Richland County: two convictions for voluntary manslaughter and one for attempted murder, each carrying a 10-year term starting on the same date. He is not eligible for parole or supervised reentry before his projected release date of May 27, 2030. Although the prison documents do not list Anderson or Bethel by name, the combination of county, timing, and the pairing of two homicide convictions with an attempted-murder conviction lines up with the Forest View Circle case, indicating that the original murder charges were resolved as voluntary manslaughter counts in connection with the deaths of the two young men and the wounding of the survivor.
While the legal system moved from arrest to conviction, Tyson Anderson’s family and friends tried to hold onto memories of who he had been before the headlines. His funeral service at Bostick-Tompkins Funeral Home in Columbia on August 14, 2019, was framed not only as mourning but as a celebration of a short but vibrant life. The program describes him as someone who made others smile, a young man who loved sports, cherished music, and left a lasting impact on those around him despite his age. In photos spanning from childhood to young adulthood, he appears with teammates, relatives, and friends, the images standing in stark contrast to the sterile language of police reports and court records. For his family, the arrest and imprisonment of the man who killed him could not replace the future that vanished on that August night on Forest View Circle; it could only mark the moment when the story of his death finally had a measure of accountability, even as the story of his life remained frozen in memories of laughter, promise, and the smile everyone remembered.
