Percy Luther Johnson, a 31-year-old Black man, came to Augusta from Fredericksburg, Virginia, for Father's Day weekend, and the night that should have been about family ended in gunfire on the 700 block of Broad Street in downtown Augusta in the early hours of June 19, 2022. Authorities said he had been shot at least once and was taken by EMS to Augusta University Medical Center, where Richmond County Coroner Mark Bowen said he was pronounced dead at 2:43 a.m. Reports at the time described him as having spent part of the evening out enjoying himself before everything turned.
What emerged from witness accounts was a scene of confusion and violence rather than a clear explanation. Local reporting said a fight was happening around the time of the shooting, but it was not clear whether Johnson had been involved in that altercation or simply got caught in the chaos. In the immediate aftermath, an autopsy was scheduled, and the killing deepened local anxiety because it came during a stretch of deadly violence on Broad Street that had already shaken downtown Augusta.
On the question of suspects and arrests, the public record I could verify online is notably thin. The contemporaneous reports said no suspect had been announced and no arrest had been made in Johnson's killing, and I did not find later online reporting identifying a suspect, charging anyone, or describing a trial or conviction tied to his death. In other words, based on the online sources I located, his case appears to have remained publicly unsolved in the reporting that followed.
That leaves Johnson's death standing in the record as a brief visit that ended on a downtown street before sunrise, with the basic outline of the crime known but the person responsible still absent from the public story. The details that remain most consistent across reports are the place, the hour, the trip to see family, and the absence of any publicly announced arrest in the sources available online.
