Faith Elizabeth Garza, a 24-year-old woman, had roots in Texas and close family ties in San Antonio, but in the summer of 2018 she and her boyfriend, Anthony Cruz Garcia, had just moved to a rural property in Fountain Inn, South Carolina. They were living together in a small camper on family land along Tullyton Drive, a makeshift home that was meant to be the start of a new chapter rather than the end of one.
Friends and relatives would later remember her as a free spirit, and obituary notices from Texas confirm her August 29, 1993 birthdate and the strong connection she maintained to her parents and siblings back home even after the move.
On Sunday afternoon, July 1, 2018, that quiet stretch of Laurens County was broken by a 9-1-1 call reporting violence at the camper. Deputies from the Laurens County Sheriff's Office arrived on Tullyton Drive to find Garza inside, dead from an apparent gunshot wound inflicted with a handgun. The sheriff's office quickly described the incident as domestic in nature: what had begun as an argument between Garza and Garcia inside their cramped living space had escalated until Garcia turned the gun on her. The killing placed her among South Carolina's 2018 domestic-violence homicide victims, later memorialized by the state Attorney General's Silent Witness program, which listed “Faith Garza, 24 years old, Laurens County” among those lost to intimate-partner violence that year.
In the chaotic aftermath of the shooting, Garcia did not stay at the scene. Investigators reported that he fled in Garza's vehicle, leaving the camper and its terrible silence behind. A short time later, law enforcement officers located him in neighboring Greenville County, took him into custody, and transported him back to Laurens County. There, he was booked into the Johnson Detention Center and initially charged with murder in connection with Garza's death. Public records and gun-violence memorials list her as having been “lost to gun violence” on July 1, 2018 in Fountain Inn, underscoring how quickly the argument in the camper had become a fatal act that rippled across two states and two families.
The criminal case moved slowly through the courts, but it did not vanish into the unsolved files. In December 2019, as his trial date approached in 8th Circuit General Sessions Court, Garcia chose to plead guilty to voluntary manslaughter rather than face a jury on the original murder charge. A Laurens County judge accepted the plea and sentenced him to the maximum 30 years in prison allowed for that offense, giving him credit for the 519 days he had already spent in custody awaiting trial. Court coverage noted again that Garcia was accused of killing Garza during an argument in the camper on family property, after the couple had recently arrived from San Antonio, and of fleeing in her vehicle once she lay dead. With the lengthy manslaughter sentence imposed, authorities and the courts treated the case as resolved, with Garcia identified as the sole perpetrator; no additional suspects have been publicly named.
While the legal system worked through its process in South Carolina, Garza's family brought her home to Texas. Funeral-home records show that services were held on July 9, 2018 at Chapel Hill Funeral Home and Crematory in San Antonio, followed by committal at Chapel Hill Memorial Park, where she was laid to rest. Online memorials and obituaries describe her surviving relatives—her father Mike, her mother Elizabeth, siblings, grandparents and extended family—who gathered to say goodbye and to anchor her story in something more than the bare facts of a case file. On the National Gun Violence Memorial site, her name appears in a roll of victims from Fountain Inn, a reminder that the violence in the camper was not just a statistic but the abrupt end of a young woman's life and future.
