On the night of April 18, 2022, Jenefer Holt Herron, a 52-year-old woman from Augusta, was caught in a sudden and deadly confrontation at the Circle K at 1739 Walton Way. News reports and court records describe her going into the store shortly before 11 p.m., where another woman, later identified as Yelena Buckner, began causing a disturbance. The later civil filings say the encounter inside the store included threatening and racist remarks directed at Herron.
When Herron left the store and walked back toward her vehicle, the conflict moved outside with her, and she was shot in the parking lot. She was taken to Augusta University Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead, turning what had begun as a stop at a convenience store into one of Richmond County's homicides that week.
Authorities said the suspect fled the scene in a gray SUV, but the escape did not last long. By the following morning, investigators had found Buckner and taken her into custody. Reporting at the time said Buckner, 33, was charged with murder and possession of a firearm during the commission of a crime. The broad outline of the case stayed consistent across later public references: an argument escalated, Herron was shot outside the gas station, and Buckner was identified as the person accused of pulling the trigger.
What emerged afterward in the public record was less a stream of criminal-case updates than the shadow the killing left behind. Herron's obituary remembered her as an Augusta native, a volunteer with Mercy Ministries, someone who loved family trips to the beach and occasional solo rides to the mountains on her Harley. Her death also surfaced in a wrongful-death and premises-liability lawsuit filed by her children against Circle K-related defendants, and that federal court order preserved some of the most detailed publicly accessible allegations about the moments before the shooting. Publicly available sources located here clearly document the arrest and the initial charges against Buckner, but they do not clearly show a later trial result or conviction in readily accessible reporting tied to this case.
