Zackary Aiken, a 22-year-old Black man from Charleston, South Carolina, was killed in the early morning hours of February 4, 2016, outside an apartment building on Hazelwood Drive in the West Ashley area of the city. Not long after midnight, Charleston police were called to the 1900 block of Hazelwood Drive, a large multi-unit apartment complex, where they found him lying on the ground behind one of the buildings with a gunshot wound.
Officers and medics tried to save him, rushing him to the Medical University of South Carolina, but he was pronounced dead at the hospital a short time later.
In the hours that followed, investigators began piecing together what had happened in the minutes before the shooting. Police told local reporters that Aiken knew the people who lived in one of the apartments and that, shortly before 1 a.m., he had tried to get into their unit through a bedroom window. According to those early accounts, one of the occupants inside the apartment fired a gun during this attempt, and the bullet struck Aiken, sending him crashing to the ground behind the building where officers later found him. Detectives quickly described the case as a domestic incident rather than a random act of violence, indicating that it grew out of an existing relationship and conflict between the people involved.
The killing drew enough attention that it was noted on national databases tracking gun deaths, which recorded Aiken as having been “lost to gun violence” on February 4, 2016, in Charleston. On an online memorial dedicated to victims of shootings, friends and community members later added comments and memories, portraying him as funny, loving, caring, and talented, and listing the local schools he had attended, including Stall High School and Ladson Elementary. In the stark language of news reports he was simply “the victim,” but on those memorial pages he appears as a whole person whose life was rooted in the neighborhoods and schools of the Charleston area.
Even as his family and friends mourned, police emphasized that the investigation was ongoing. Initial reports made it clear that, in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, no one had been arrested. Detectives treated the apartment and surrounding grounds as a crime scene, collected evidence, and interviewed occupants and neighbors, but they did not publicly identify the person who pulled the trigger or announce any charges. The framing of the case as a domestic or criminal domestic violence shooting suggested that investigators were trying to sort out whether any self-defense or other legal justifications might be raised by those inside the apartment, but those questions played out largely out of public view.
Several days later, on February 8, 2016, Charleston police took the unusual step of naming a man they believed had been present when Aiken was killed. They announced they were looking for 23-year-old Joshua Grampus, describing him by age, height, build, and race, and labeling him a “person of interest” in what they called a CDV shooting. At the same time, officials stressed that Grampus had no active warrants connected to the case; they were seeking him for questioning, not announcing him as the shooter or formally accusing him of a crime. The department asked anyone who saw him to call police rather than approach him, and renewed their request for tips from anyone who might have information about the moments before or after the gunfire on Hazelwood Drive.
Despite that public appeal, available reporting does not show the case progressing into a publicized arrest or trial. Both the initial coverage of the shooting and the later article naming Grampus noted that no arrests had been made, and there are no widely reported follow-up stories indicating that the apartment occupant who fired the gun, Grampus, or anyone else was ever charged in connection with Aiken’s death. In the public record, the narrative remains frozen in those first days: a late-night attempt to reach people he knew inside a West Ashley apartment, a single shot from within that home, a frantic effort by officers and doctors to save him, and a homicide investigation that, at least in the view of the media and online memorials that still carry his name, never fully resolved into answers or accountability.
