Donald Timothy Lloyd Jr. was a 27-year-old Black man from Ladson, South Carolina, a son, brother, and father whose life was deeply woven into a close-knit family that called the Lowcountry home. He was known to loved ones as “Timmy,” a young man with five children who, by all accounts, meant the world to him and to the relatives helping raise them.
On the night of Tuesday, July 21, 2015, summer heat still hung over Ladson when calls came in about gunfire near the Ladson Flea Market, close to the intersection of College Park Road and Frank Jones Road, not far from Interstate 26. Deputies and first responders rushed to the scene around 8:30 p.m. and found Lloyd lying in the roadway on Frank Jones Road, suffering from at least one gunshot wound. Despite efforts at the scene, he was pronounced dead, and the Berkeley County coroner ordered an autopsy as the Sheriff’s Office quickly classified the case as a homicide.
In the hours that followed, investigators worked through the night, collecting what evidence they could from the darkened roadside. The sheriff publicly promised that a team of detectives would work “around the clock” to determine what had happened and to bring some measure of closure to Lloyd’s family. But even early on, authorities hinted at the difficulties they faced: there were few clear leads, and the evidence at the scene was limited, leaving more questions than answers about who had confronted Lloyd that evening and why.
For his family, the events of that night were not abstract details in a police report but a memory etched in pain. His sister, Patrice Stevens, later described frantically calling 911 and performing CPR on her brother, only to realize she would have to turn to their mother and say the words no parent should ever hear: that her son was gone. In the years since the shooting, she has helped raise Lloyd’s five children, determined that they grow up knowing that their father’s life mattered and that his death should not be something people simply move past.
Detectives continued to revisit the case, and the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office issued renewed appeals for information, emphasizing that the crime scene had yielded little forensic evidence and that solving the case would likely depend on someone in the community stepping forward. At one point, deputies arrested an acquaintance of Lloyd and charged that person with obstruction of justice after learning they had moved a key piece of evidence from the scene. Authorities made clear, however, that this individual was not believed to be the shooter, and no one has been charged with Lloyd’s murder itself.
Years later, the stretch of Frank Jones Road where Lloyd fell remains tied to an unanswered act of violence. His family and investigators still wait for the moment when someone comes forward with the missing piece of information—enough to place a suspect at that roadside on a July night and to carry the case from a cold file on a detective’s desk into a courtroom where the questions that have haunted his children, siblings, and mother might finally find an answer.
