Tyrell Bess was 25 years old, a Black/African American male from the Ladson–Summerville area of South Carolina, a young father whose life was closely tied to his family and his community. Public obituaries describe him as a resident of Ladson who “entered into eternal rest” on August 14, 2015, and list a wide circle of loved ones left behind: his parents, Shawn Bess and Lucy Capers, his stepfather Freddie Capers Sr., and several children, including a son who bears his name.
Online condolence messages written in the days after his death speak in simple, emotional phrases—family members calling him “big guy,” promising that their memories of him would last forever, and a father leaving a short note years later that simply says he loves his son, underscoring how deeply his absence continued to be felt.
On August 14, 2015, the quiet around Lincolnville, a small town near Summerville, was broken by gunfire. When deputies from the Charleston County Sheriff’s Office responded, they found Bess’s body in a wooded area, not far from several spent shell casings. News reports at the time referred to the case as a fatal shooting and noted that he had been killed by gunfire, making clear that this was no natural passing but a violent death. Later remembrances would place his killing within the broader toll of gun violence in the region, listing him among those “lost to gun violence” on that date in Summerville. The stark description—a body in the woods, shell casings nearby—suggested to investigators that he had been lured or driven to an isolated area and shot there, away from the main roads and houses.
In the weeks that followed, detectives worked the case, sifting through physical evidence recovered from the scene. According to contemporary accounts, that evidence eventually pointed them toward a man from nearby Lincolnville. On September 30, 2015, authorities announced that 23-year-old Thomas S. McFadden Jr. had been arrested by a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force outside a restaurant in North Charleston. Charleston County Sheriff’s Office officials said McFadden was charged with murder in the slaying of Bess, and that it was the physical evidence collected where the body was found that helped them identify him as the suspected gunman. McFadden was booked into the Charleston County jail, and officials indicated he would appear before a judge for a bond hearing, while it remained unclear at that time whether he had an attorney to speak on his behalf. For Bess’s family, the arrest offered at least a glimpse of accountability, the suggestion that someone might one day be held responsible for the killing that had torn through their lives.
Years later, the name Thomas Scott McFadden Jr. would return to headlines in connection with another deadly shooting. A Charleston County jury found him guilty of murdering Damien Marquise Stokes in 2019, and he was sentenced to life in prison. In coverage of that later case, reporters noted that law enforcement had long suspected McFadden of involvement in multiple shootings around Lincolnville. Crucially for Bess’s killing, those same reports state that McFadden was acquitted of the 2015 fatal shooting of Tyrell Bess. In other words, the one man ever publicly charged with Bess’s murder ultimately walked free on that specific count, even as he went to prison for life in an unrelated homicide. Publicly available records and reporting do not show any other person being charged or convicted in the death of Bess, leaving the question of who, in the eyes of the law, killed him unresolved.
While the criminal case stalled, the memory of Bess continued to live on in the digital traces of grief. His name appears on national gun violence memorial sites, where a photograph and a short line mark him as having been lost to gunfire in Summerville on August 14, 2015; hundreds of virtual candles have been lit in his memory there. Obituary pages and guest books remain open years later, periodically receiving new messages from relatives and friends who still address him directly, promising they will never forget him or telling his mother and father that they are keeping the family in their prayers. Viewed together, these fragments tell a story with a jagged edge: a young man from the Ladson–Summerville community, a son and father whose life ended in a wooded patch of Lincolnville; an arrest built on physical evidence; an accused shooter later acquitted of his killing; and a family and community left to carry the weight of a murder that, on the public record, has never resulted in a conviction.
