On a late April morning in 2016, Daniel Ray Setliff, a 70-year-old man from the Timmonsville area of Florence County, South Carolina, was found dead inside his home, the quiet of the property broken by the arrival of multiple sheriff’s cruisers and crime-scene tape stretching across the yard. Not long after 11 a.m. on Tuesday, April 26, deputies from the Florence County Sheriff’s Office and officials from the Florence County Coroner’s Office entered the residence on Lagoon Drive, a small
road off South Hill Road in the Timmonsville community, and discovered Daniel’s body. What at first was simply a welfare or emergency call quickly took on the gravity of a major crime scene.
Inside the home, investigators determined that Daniel had been killed by gunfire. Local coverage described him only as a 70-year-old man whose body was discovered in his own house, with officials confirming that he had been shot to death. The discovery in the middle of the day, in a residential area, underscored how abruptly violence had intruded into what should have been the safety of his private space. The coroner, Keith von Lutcken, publicly identified the victim as Daniel Ray Setliff and confirmed that the investigation was being treated as a possible homicide, signaling that authorities believed another person was responsible for his death rather than any sort of accident or self-inflicted wound.
The timing of Daniel’s death is recorded slightly differently depending on the source, reflecting the gap between the moment he was killed and the moment authorities found him. A local obituary from Burroughs Funeral Home and Cremation Services lists his date of death as Monday, April 25, 2016, and notes that he was born on December 19, 1945 and was a resident of Florence, South Carolina at the time of his passing. Gun-violence documentation and news coverage, however, emphasize April 26, 2016—the day law enforcement was called to Lagoon Drive and discovered his body—as the date when he was “lost to gun violence” in Timmonsville, tying his death to the specific incident that brought officers and crime-scene investigators to his home.
In the days that followed, the case entered the wider record as yet another fatal shooting in a small South Carolina community. The National Gun Violence Memorial lists Daniel among the people killed with guns on April 26, 2016, noting his name, age, and the Timmonsville location of the incident, and linking to the local television reports that first brought his story to the public. On the site’s page dedicated to him, visitors have lit dozens of virtual candles in his memory, a small but telling sign that his death left a mark on family, friends, and others who later learned about the case.
Despite the grim attention that accompanies any homicide investigation, publicly accessible records show no indication that a suspect was ever named or arrested in connection with Daniel Ray Setliff’s killing. The initial reports from the scene focus on the discovery of his body and the opening of a homicide investigation, but do not reference any person of interest, description of a potential assailant, or motive. Subsequent news archives and gun-violence databases that mention his case continue to present it only as a fatal shooting in his home, without follow-up stories announcing charges, trials, or convictions. Based on the information currently available from those sources, his death appears to remain an unsolved homicide, with the questions of who entered his home, why they fired the shots that ended his life, and whether they will ever be held accountable still unanswered in the public record.
