Candy Moore was a 56-year-old woman from North Charleston, South Carolina, whose ordinary June evening in 2017 ended in sudden gunfire on St. Johns Avenue. Late on the night of June 7, police were called to the 3800 block of the street, an apartment complex where residents were settling in for the night when the quiet was broken by shots and frantic calls for help.
Officers and emergency medics arrived to find Moore lying in the parking lot, gravely wounded, and an adult man inside one of the apartments suffering from gunshot injuries of his own. Both were rushed to a local hospital; the man would survive, but Moore’s wounds proved fatal and she was pronounced dead not long afterward.
In the chaotic moments before the shooting, according to the surviving victim, there had been a knock or noise at the apartment door. He told investigators that when he opened it, he was confronted by a man holding a handgun. The intruder stepped into the apartment and began firing, striking both occupants in the confined space. Moore managed to flee the unit despite her injuries, staggering out into the night and making it as far as the front parking lot before collapsing, where officers later found her. The gunman, meanwhile, fled the scene as neighbors and passersby tried to make sense of the sudden violence, and patrol cars converged on St. Johns Avenue under the glow of flashing lights.
Witnesses described the shooter as a man wearing a white shirt and blue jeans with a close-cropped haircut, seen running away from the complex toward Ohear Avenue and possibly leaving the area on a moped. In the days that followed, detectives with the North Charleston Police Department worked to turn those fragments of description into something more concrete. On June 13, investigators released a composite sketch of a person of interest they believed had been seen in the area around the time of the homicide, hoping someone in the community would recognize the face. Public appeals emphasized that the case involved a deadly double shooting just after 11 p.m. on June 7 and urged anyone who knew the man in the sketch, or who had information about where he spent time and with whom he associated, to contact the lead detective.
While detectives pursued leads, Moore’s family and friends were left to plan a funeral rather than a recovery. Her obituary in the local paper invited relatives and friends to a service at Murray’s Mortuary Chapel on Rivers Avenue in North Charleston on June 17, 2017, with a viewing the afternoon before and burial at Monrovia Cemetery in Charleston. The notice recorded that she was survived by her fiancé, Rico Banks; her daughter, Tamara Hill, and Tamara’s husband, Brian; along with siblings and a wider circle of relatives and friends who had woven around her over the years. Online guest books quickly filled with messages from neighbors and loved ones who remembered her as sweet, loving, and kindhearted, the sort of person who checked in on the people next door and filled her home with laughter and conversation. For them, the clinical phrase “gunshot wounds” on a coroner’s report translated into an empty chair at family gatherings and a quiet space where her friendly knock had once sounded.
In the broader context of North Charleston’s struggle with violence, police noted at the time that Moore’s death marked one of the city’s growing number of homicides for 2017, a grim tally that underscored the urgency behind their investigation. Yet public reporting on the case after the release of the composite sketch focuses on appeals for information rather than on any identified suspect being taken into custody. Contemporary accounts describe the investigation as ongoing, and there are no later news reports linking an arrest, criminal charges, or a trial to the St. Johns Avenue shooting that claimed her life. As a result, Moore’s family and community have had to move forward without the closure that a resolved case might bring, carrying her memory through obituaries, guestbook tributes, and candles lit in her name while the unanswered questions about the man who came to the apartment door that night remain. turn9search3
