On February 8, 2015, violence cut through the quiet around Ridgeland, South Carolina, when Gussie “BooBoo” Goldwire Jr., a 32-year-old Black man, was shot outside the town. The first accounts that surfaced in the days after described a frantic race against time: his injuries were severe enough that he was being transported by air toward Savannah, and the coroner later said he died late that Sunday during the flight to Memorial University Medical Center.
In the blur after the gunfire, a bystander tried to keep him alive until help could take over, according to reporting that cited an anonymous witness who spoke with local television. That small detail—someone kneeling in the aftermath, trying to hold on to a stranger’s life—became one of the few public glimpses of what happened in the moments between the shooting and the emergency response.
As word spread, investigators moved in. Early reporting said the Jasper County Sheriff’s Office and the South Carolina State Law Enforcement Division were investigating the killing outside Ridgeland. In the public reporting available from that period, authorities focused on the active investigation and the circumstances of his death rather than naming a suspect, and no specific arrests or charges were described in those contemporaneous accounts.
After the initial shock, grief settled into the practical rituals of farewell. His death notice and obituary placed him in the Lowcountry’s tight geography—reported as being of the Ridgeland/Robertville area—and noted that services were handled through Bostick Funeral Home in Ridgeland, with his passing recorded in Savannah. The story that began in gunfire ended, publicly, in funeral arrangements and family remembrance—while the question of who pulled the trigger remained unanswered in the sources that were accessible.
