In the quiet of a December morning in 2000, the discovery of a young man's body in a church parking lot shattered the peace of Sumter County. Twenty-year-old Edward Pressley Haynesworth had been found in the parking lot of the Pinehill AME Zion Church, his life taken by three gunshot wounds. Tire tracks circling his body and unidentified berries found on him were the only initial clues in a case that would take years to see a courtroom.
Investigators believed he had been shot at a different location between the late hours of December 9th and the morning of December 10th before his body was left at the church on U.S. 521 South.
For more than three years, the case remained a painful mystery for Haynesworth's loved ones. Then, in February 2004, a Sumter County Grand Jury indicted 25-year-old Quinzell Robinson for the murder of Edward Pressley Haynesworth. The indictment brought a glimmer of hope for justice, though the motive for the killing remained elusive. The prosecution's case against Robinson hinged on a sequence of events that began with a stolen Cadillac and culminated in a trunk stained with blood, weaving a narrative of a life cut tragically short.
In April 2005, the trial against Quinzell Robinson commenced, with a jury of seven women and five men tasked with weighing the evidence presented. The assistant solicitor, in his opening statements, acknowledged the long and arduous wait for this day of reckoning, emphasizing the gravity of the charge. The state methodically began to build its case, calling its first witness to the stand and setting in motion the legal proceedings that would ultimately determine the accountability for the death of Edward Pressley Haynesworth.
