Sean Robert Bussard, 41, a White male from the Augusta area, was killed on the night of January 12, 2019, at a home on New Karleen Road in Hephzibah, near Augusta. Early reports described deputies being called to the 3800 block in reference to shots fired, where they found Bussard with a gunshot wound to the head. The Richmond County coroner said he was pronounced dead at 10 p.m., and in those first hours the case opened with the familiar stillness that follows sudden violence: a man dead at
home, a neighborhood left with questions, and no suspect immediately announced.
For a short time, that was all the public seemed to know. Bussard’s death was reported as an overnight shooting, and the earliest local accounts made clear that investigators had not yet named anyone in connection with it. He was remembered in obituary notices as a native of Augusta and a self-employed landscaper, details that gave the case a human outline beyond the crime scene itself.
The case took a dramatic turn days later when investigators tied the killing to Rex Allen Stewart Jr. According to local reporting and an Associated Press account, Stewart was arrested after a separate incident in which he and Cyndi Faye Bowen were accused of shooting at a Richmond County deputy during a traffic stop. Authorities said that during the investigation into that encounter, Stewart was questioned and then charged with Bussard’s murder. Public reports identified Stewart, then 36, as the man charged in the January 12 fatal shooting at Bussard’s home. Bowen was arrested in the deputy-shooting case on aggravated assault and weapons charges, but the sources I found did not identify her as charged in Bussard’s killing.
So the story that emerges from the online record is one of a homicide that began with very little public information and then suddenly sharpened when another burst of violence brought investigators to a suspect. Bussard was found dead in his residence on New Karleen Road; initially there were no announced suspects; then, within days, Stewart was charged with murder after his arrest in the separate deputy-shooting investigation. In the online sources located for this synopsis, the public record is clearest through that arrest and murder charge, while later reporting on any trial, conviction, or final court outcome was not spelled out in the sources I found.
