Timothy Ray “Timmy” Morgan was a 48-year-old man from Columbia, South Carolina, born on September 2, 1967, and he died on Sunday, September 27, 2015. He grew up in Columbia, the son of David Earl Morgan and Bonnie Lou Holt Morgan, and his roots in the city ran deep, tying him closely to both his immediate family and a wider circle of relatives who knew him simply as Timmy.
Obituaries and memorials describe a life that unfolded largely in and around the Midlands of South Carolina, where he moved through familiar neighborhoods, family gatherings, and the outdoor spaces that suited his favorite pastimes.
Those who wrote about him after his death remembered not the violence that ended his life, but the passions that filled it. Timmy was an avid hunter, particularly drawn to the discipline of archery; he hunted with a bow and arrow and took part in archery competitions, suggesting long hours of practice and quiet concentration, the sort of devotion that marks a craft as much as a sport. The same notices record family ties that framed his everyday world: he was predeceased by his biological mother, Margaret Leila Holt Plowden, and a sister, Melissa Ann Morgan, losses that his surviving family carried with them even before his own death added another absence to their history.
On the last Sunday of his life, that history was abruptly broken by gunfire. Public memorial records list Timothy Morgan as having been “lost to gun violence” in Columbia on September 27, 2015, and link his death to local news coverage identifying a man shot and killed that Sunday near Garners Ferry Road. In the stark language of those summaries, he is one name among many in a national tally of people taken by bullets, but for his family the event marked a singular, irreplaceable loss. The official role of the Richland County coroner emerges in the background of this story through those references, underscoring that his death was treated as a shooting death requiring formal identification and public notice.
Behind the brief incident line stands the fuller picture of the people left to mourn him. Obituaries list two sons, Matthew Wade Morgan of Bluefield, West Virginia, and Timothy Christopher Morgan of McDowell County, West Virginia, whose lives now carry forward without their father. They also name brothers Billy Yeater of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Frankie Morgan of Hampstead, North Carolina; a niece, Alexis Nicole Morgan; and a cousin, Sherry Gregory of Smyrna, Tennessee, tracing a map of grief that stretches well beyond Columbia. In October 2015, family and friends gathered at Dunbar Funeral Home’s Devine Street Chapel for his funeral service, after which he was laid to rest in Crescent Hill Memorial Gardens, a fixed place in the city’s landscape where those who knew him can come to remember the man he was before the reporting reduced him to a date and a cause of death.
Yet, for all the emotion implied by these memorials, the public record of the shooting itself remains thin. The online obituaries, the cemetery listing, and the national gun-violence memorial entry that acknowledge his killing do not provide details about what led up to the gunfire, who might have been present, or how the confrontation began or ended beyond the fact that he was shot and killed. None of these sources mention a named suspect, any subsequent arrests, specific criminal charges, or the outcome of a trial, if one ever took place, leaving outsiders to understand his death chiefly as an unsolved or at least undocumented act of violence in the public record. In that sense, Timothy Ray “Timmy” Morgan’s story, as it appears online, is divided sharply in two: a textured life described through family ties and the quiet focus of archery, and a final moment of gunfire near Garners Ferry Road that the available sources record only in the barest outline, with no clear account of who was responsible or how justice, if any, was pursued on his behalf.
