Dennis Wayne “Blue” Kitchens, a 51-year-old Black male from Thomson, Georgia, died on May 27, 2021, after a shooting that turned an ordinary late afternoon into a homicide case. Local obituary notices identify him by name and hometown, and family memorials describe a man born in Augusta who was known as “Blue,” someone remembered for cutting hair, fishing, grilling, and loving his family. What the public record makes plain is that his last day ended in violence, not in the quiet way his family's remembrance might suggest.
According to contemporaneous reporting in The McDuffie Progress, Kitchens arrived at University McDuffie Hospital with a gunshot wound to the stomach at about 5:30 p.m. on May 27. The McDuffie County Sheriff's Office responded to the hospital, and the Georgia Bureau of Investigation was called in to assist. Kitchens was then transferred to Augusta University Medical Center, where he later died from his gunshot wounds. The same report says investigators determined the shooting had taken place at a home in the 1800 block of Hamilton Drive in Thomson, giving the case a grimly intimate shape: this was not described as a random disappearance or a body found long afterward, but a shooting tied quickly to a specific place and a specific chain of events.
Authorities said Robert Lee Neal Sr., 59, drove Kitchens to the hospital but left before deputies arrived. Investigators then went to Neal's home on Hamilton Drive, where they concluded the shooting had occurred, and Neal was arrested there. The charges reported against him were felony murder, possession of a firearm by a convicted felon or first offender, possession of a firearm during the commission of certain felonies, and felony tampering with evidence. In the days that followed, local coverage said bond was denied, underscoring how seriously prosecutors and the court were treating the case from the start.
As for what happened after the arrest, the online record is thinner and less fully documented in broadly accessible sources than the initial reporting on the shooting itself. One later public booking record indicates Robert Lee Neal was booked in McDuffie County on June 27, 2024, with the status listed as “sentenced,” suggesting the case progressed beyond the initial arrest stage, but the accessible sources reviewed here do not clearly spell out the final conviction details or sentence terms. Based on the online reporting that is readily available, the clearest public account is that Kitchens was shot on May 27, 2021, taken to the hospital by the man later charged in his death, and that the investigation quickly focused on Neal as the lone named suspect in the case.
