On a cold December morning in 2016, Clinton Pearson, a 49-year-old Black man from Greenville, South Carolina, was spending the early hours at a modest house in the Poe Mill neighborhood when violence found him. Born in 1967 and raised in Spartanburg County, he had built a life surrounded by family and faith. He was the husband of Sonya Richardson Pearson, the son of Annie Johnson and the late Clinton Berry, and a father and stepfather to several children, including his son Clinton Jr.
He had attended Byrnes High School and worshipped at Redemption World Outreach in Greenville, where he had been baptized, roots that spoke to long-standing ties in the Upstate community.
In the early morning hours of December 8, 2016, deputies and the Greenville County coroner were called to a home on Cox Street, a short dead-end road off Goldsmith Street in the Poe Mill area. Around 3:30 a.m., they found Pearson inside the residence with multiple gunshot wounds. He was pronounced dead at the scene, and Coroner Parks Evans quickly ruled the death a homicide. In the immediate aftermath, investigators had few details to share publicly. Early reports simply described a man found shot to death in the house and noted that no arrests had been made, leaving the neighborhood and Pearson’s family with more questions than answers as the case began.
Over the next months and years, the investigation revealed that Pearson’s killing was not a random act but the result of a planned home invasion. Prosecutors later detailed how, during the early morning hours of that same day, three young men came together with the intention of robbing the Cox Street residence. Believing the house contained a large quantity of drugs, they met at the Shemwood Crossing apartments in Greenville, then drove together into the Poe Mill neighborhood toward the small home where Pearson was staying. According to the solicitor, the plan was violent from the outset: as they arrived, one of the suspects fired shots through the front window of the house while another kicked the door open, shattering whatever sense of safety existed inside that modest structure.
Amid the chaos, Connell Shauntaveis Wells Jr., who was armed with a 9 mm handgun, followed the others into the home. The gunfire that tore through the window and doorway struck Pearson, and he died there on the floor of the Cox Street residence before help could reach him. Investigators ultimately built a case showing that Wells had joined with the other two defendants in the robbery scheme that ended in Pearson’s death. In March 2019, Wells, then 22, stood in court and pleaded guilty to murdering Pearson during the home invasion. A Greenville County judge sentenced him to 30 years in prison, a lengthy term meant to account for the deadly outcome of the planned robbery. At the time of that sentencing, officials said the two remaining suspects were still awaiting trial, leaving open chapters in the legal story even as Pearson’s family had at least one name and conviction tied to the night that changed their lives.
