Ryane O’Neil Swims Jr., a 27-year-old Black male, was killed in downtown Savannah, Georgia, in the early morning hours of October 22, 2023, after what began as a night out ended in gunfire at the intersection of Whitaker Street and Congress Street. Savannah police said officers were called to the area around 1:30 a.m. on reports of shots fired, and when they arrived they found one man dead from an apparent gunshot wound. Swims was later identified by the Chatham County coroner. Reports about him described a former soldier who had once been stationed at Fort Stewart, and his family later spoke publicly about the shock of losing him so suddenly and so violently. Another male was also wounded in the same shooting and was taken to Memorial Health with injuries described as non-life-threatening.
In the days that followed, the case moved from a downtown homicide investigation to an arrest. Savannah police announced that Larry Pounds III, 19, had been charged with murder in connection with the shooting. The arrest was reported as coming less than two weeks after the killing, with police identifying him as the suspect tied to the violence at Whitaker and Congress. Public reporting tied the murder charge directly to Swims’s death, making Pounds the central named suspect in the case.
The online record available from the sources reviewed paints a picture of a case that quickly produced a named arrest, but it does not clearly show a later public outcome such as a trial verdict or conviction in connection with Swims’s killing. What stands out most in the reporting is the abruptness of the violence: a crowded downtown corridor, gunfire before dawn, one man dead at the scene, another surviving, and a family left to speak for a son whose life had carried him from Michigan to military service in Georgia before ending on a Savannah street. The clearest suspect information publicly reported in the sources is the arrest and murder charge against Larry Pounds III.
