Larry Swearingen III, a 42-year-old White male Army veteran from Aiken, South Carolina, died on August 10, 2019, after a shooting that shattered what had begun as an ordinary walk home. Reports said he had been on Laurens Street with his wife, Jess, and their daughter when gunfire erupted. He was taken to Augusta University Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead that Saturday evening, several days after the attack.
In the aftermath, the loss rippled beyond the crime scene: family accounts and obituary notices painted him as a husband, father, and former soldier whose death left his household reeling while loved ones tried to make sense of how a family outing had turned into a killing.
Investigators quickly focused on Dae'Kwon Simmons, who was 17 at the time. News reports said police identified him as the suspected shooter soon after the attack, and after several tense days he was arrested and charged with murder. Authorities also filed two counts of attempted murder tied to the danger posed to Swearingen’s wife and daughter during the shooting. Another juvenile was reported to have been charged in connection with the same episode, reflecting investigators’ belief that the violence did not unfold in a vacuum but involved others around the event. The case, as it developed publicly, carried the grim rhythm common to street-corner killings: the urgent search for a suspect, the family’s mourning before burial plans were even settled, and then the long, procedural march from arrest to courtroom judgment.
That march ended in conviction. South Carolina court records show Simmons was convicted of murder and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, and he received a sentence of 38 years in prison. An appellate opinion filed on May 7, 2025, affirmed those convictions and that sentence, leaving the verdict intact. The opinion also makes clear that testimony from a witness with a juvenile adjudication connected to the same incident became part of the fight on appeal, underscoring that the case was contested even after trial. In the end, though, the legal system did not undo the jury’s decision. What remained was the permanent fact at the center of it all: Larry Swearingen never came home from that walk, and the man accused of causing his death remained, in the eyes of the courts, the man lawfully convicted for it.
