On the evening of September 2, 2014, Kwame Campbell, a 24-year-old Black man from Latta, South Carolina, was caught in a burst of gunfire on Atkinson Street, a residential stretch in the small Dillon County town. Witnesses in the neighborhood heard shots sometime between eight and nine that night, and the quiet street was suddenly transformed into a crime scene.
After being shot, Campbell managed to move from where he fell and make his way to a nearby house to seek help, turning a neighbor’s doorstep into an emergency triage point as someone inside called 911 to report the gunfire and the wounded man outside.
Deputies from the Dillon County Sheriff’s Office responded to reports of shots fired on Atkinson Street and found Campbell suffering from a gunshot wound. Emergency medical personnel from Dillon County EMS rushed him to McLeod Medical Center in Dillon, the regional hospital that receives many of the county’s trauma cases. Despite those efforts, he was pronounced dead there a short time later, and the Dillon County coroner formally identified him as the victim, confirming that the violence on Atkinson Street had claimed his life.
As word of the killing spread through Latta, investigators began working the scene, combing Atkinson Street for evidence and speaking with residents who had heard or seen the events of the night. Within hours, their focus settled on a man who lived on the same street. By the next day, authorities announced the arrest of 35-year-old Kenneth Ray Hunter Jr., also of Atkinson Street, alleging that he was responsible for the fatal shooting. He was charged with murder and with possession of a dangerous weapon or weapon during the commission of a violent crime, and booked into custody as the sole suspect in the case.
The investigation was handled primarily by the Dillon County Sheriff’s Office, with assistance from the Dillon County Coroner’s Office and the police departments in Latta and the nearby city of Dillon, reflecting the seriousness of a homicide in such a small community. Officials indicated that, based on their inquiries, they were not searching for any additional suspects beyond Hunter, suggesting they believed the shooting to have been carried out by a single gunman rather than as part of a broader conspiracy or group attack.
Beyond the initial arrest and charging documents, publicly available news accounts and memorial records offer few details about what led up to the confrontation on Atkinson Street that night or about Campbell’s life before his death, aside from his youth and roots in Latta. They do not clarify whether there had been an argument, a prior relationship, or some other dispute between Campbell and Hunter, nor do they describe a fully documented courtroom resolution. Contemporary reporting stops after describing the arrest, the charges, and the agencies involved, leaving the later course of the case—whether it went to trial, ended in a plea, or reached some other conclusion—largely undocumented in accessible public sources, even as Campbell’s name remains preserved in local memories and on gun-violence memorial sites as one of Latta’s lost sons.
