Lorenzo Johnston, a 28-year-old Black male from Georgetown, Georgia, was killed in Eufaula, Alabama, on the night of April 3, 2020, when what should have been an ordinary gathering inside a home on South Dr. T.V. McCoo Boulevard turned into a robbery and a burst of gunfire. Police said the shooting happened around 11:15 p.m. Johnston and two other people were inside the residence when shots were fired.
By the time the chaos ended, Johnston was dead, one wounded man had run from the house and was flown to a Dothan hospital, and another survivor was reported in stable condition at Medical Center Barbour. In the earliest hours after the killing, investigators said witness statements pointed to robbery as the motive, but at that stage there had been no arrests.
What emerged from the investigation was the picture of a targeted and violent home invasion rather than a random shooting. In a later public statement, the Eufaula Police Department said an extensive investigation led to five arrests in the April 3 robbery and murder. Police publicly identified Steven Jacobie Howard of Clayton, Denise Lashune White of Eufaula, and Michael Antonio Clark of Columbus, Georgia, among those arrested, and said the suspects were arrested for capital murder. That announcement marked the shift in the case from an open homicide with frightened survivors and few immediate answers to a prosecution built around the idea that Johnston was killed during a robbery inside the residence.
The case did not end with those initial murder allegations. Later court reporting from Alabama showed that Jaquan Demetrius Van Buren was convicted in Barbour County Circuit Court on September 25, 2024, of manslaughter, attempted murder, and first-degree robbery in connection with an April 2020 card-game robbery. According to that reporting, the evidence at trial showed that after a participant in the card game complained she was being robbed and contacted others for help getting money back, Van Buren went to the apartment, kicked in the door, and entered armed with two different firearms. Prosecutors said he opened fire after accomplices collected money from the card table. He was sentenced to prison terms ranging from 360 months to 540 months, and on January 30, 2026, the Alabama Court of Criminal Appeals upheld those convictions.
Taken together, the public record tells the story of a deadly robbery that tore through a house full of people late on a Friday night and left Johnston as the only person who never made it out alive. The first reports captured the raw aftermath: a dead man on the floor, two wounded survivors, and police trying to piece together what had happened. The later reports added the longer arc of the case, showing that investigators pursued multiple suspects and that at least one defendant was ultimately convicted on charges tied to the same April 2020 robbery shooting.
