Da'Jour De'Quan Murphy, a 19-year-old man from Santee, South Carolina, spent most of his short life in the close-knit communities of Orangeburg County, where family ties, school, and church anchored his days. Obituary notices list his home as Montegue Street in Santee and note that he died on December 16, 2018, in the nearby town of Vance, a tiny municipality of just over a hundred residents in the 2020 census.
Friends and family later gathered at Providence Baptist Church in Santee for his funeral service on December 22, with visitation the day before at Williams Funeral Home in Elloree, and his body was laid to rest at Myers Cemetery, a small cemetery near Vance where generations of local families are buried.
Online memorials paint Da'Jour as more than a name in an obituary. On a gun-violence remembrance page, people who knew him contributed nicknames like “Baby Joe” and “Day,” and wrote about him as funny, smart, and “a cool person to talk to” who loved to see his loved ones happy. Others remembered how well he dressed and how naturally he drew people in with a goofy, lovable personality. The same community-sourced memorial records Lake Marion High School as a school he attended, placing him firmly in the everyday world of local hallways, classrooms, and ball courts rather than in the cold formality of case files. One entry quietly notes that he had two children, suggesting that, even at nineteen, he carried the responsibilities of fatherhood along with the ordinary hopes of a teenager on the edge of adulthood.
The violence that ended Da'Jour’s life unfolded in Vance, a town whose single community park serves as a gathering point for reunions, back-to-school events, and casual games of basketball under the South Carolina sky. Local descriptions of Vance’s park speak of a picnic shelter, a basketball court, a playground, and a walking trail, the sort of place where children play and neighbors catch up. A Times and Democrat article cited by later memorials is titled “Man killed in Vance park identified,” indicating that it was in this everyday public space that Da'Jour was shot and fatally wounded. Another online record dedicated to victims of gun violence confirms that he “lost to gun violence” on December 16, 2018, in Vance, underscoring that a firearm was the means of his death.
In the days that followed, the focus in public-facing records shifted quickly from the circumstances of the shooting to the rituals of mourning. Funeral-home announcements detailed visitation hours, the time of the service at Providence Baptist Church, and the procession to Myers Cemetery, but did not elaborate on how or why the killing happened. On the memorial page, however, the tone is more intimate: classmates, friends, and relatives wrote short messages—“rest in power,” “long live,” “we love you”—that read like fragments of conversations cut short, the everyday words of people who expected to see him again at school, at home, or around town.
What is striking in the public record is how little is said about the investigation. The gun-violence memorial links to the Times and Democrat and to a Gun Violence Archive incident entry as its news sources, but those underlying reports are either restricted or not readily accessible, leaving only their titles and citations visible to the broader public. Searches of open Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Office resources—such as “Most Wanted” notices, arrested-person listings, and general arrest-record indexes—do not show any clearly identified suspect being publicly tied to Da'Jour Murphy’s killing, nor do they note a resolved homicide corresponding to his name, date, and location of death. No press releases or follow-up news items that are accessible in the open web specifically announce an arrest, a set of charges, or a conviction in connection with the shooting that took his life.
Taken together, these fragments suggest a story that is heartbreakingly incomplete. The available sources firmly establish that Da'Jour De'Quan Murphy, a 19-year-old man from Santee, was shot and killed in a park in Vance on December 16, 2018, and that his community responded with church services, graveside rites, and an outpouring of remembrance online. But beyond the confirmation that a gun ended his life, the public trail of information grows thin. There is no accessible record of who pulled the trigger, why the confrontation happened, or whether anyone has ever been made to answer for it in court. In the absence of those answers, what remains in the open record is a portrait of a young man remembered by those who loved him—and the silence of an unresolved loss in a small South Carolina town.
