David Franklin Shrewsbury, a 44-year-old white man from Gaffney, South Carolina, was spending the early hours of Tuesday, November 21, 2023, at a modest home on Mt. Olive Road in Cowpens when the quiet of the night was broken by violence. Sometime around 12:40 a.m., Spartanburg County deputies were called to the residence about a shooting. Inside, they found Shrewsbury gravely wounded, having been shot multiple times with a shotgun, and his dog also fatally injured.
Emergency crews rushed him to Spartanburg Regional Medical Center, but he was pronounced dead shortly after 1 a.m., and the county coroner formally recorded his death in the early morning hours.
The scene deputies described was intensely personal rather than random. The shooting took place in a private home, not a public street or business, and early reports emphasized that this was not a stranger-on-stranger attack. Investigators said the suspected gunman, 28-year-old Brandon Tylar Crocker, knew Shrewsbury through Crocker’s mother, who had previously been in a relationship with the victim. She was present at the house when the shooting happened and was identified in reports and warrants as a key witness who had seen what unfolded inside the home. The warrants also stated that Shrewsbury’s dog was deliberately shot and killed during the same incident, turning what might already have been a volatile domestic situation into a double killing that shocked those who later read the details.
Within hours of the 911 call, authorities publicly named Crocker as the suspect and announced that he had been arrested in connection with the shooting. Deputies accused him of firing the shotgun repeatedly at Shrewsbury inside the Mt. Olive Road residence and emphasized that this was not a defensive exchange of gunfire, but a direct, lethal assault. He was charged with murder, reflecting the allegation that he intentionally caused Shrewsbury’s death, and with possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, a charge commonly added in South Carolina when a firearm is used in a serious offense. Because the dog was also killed, Crocker was additionally charged with ill-treatment of animals, underscoring that investigators viewed the killing of the dog as a separate act of cruelty rather than collateral damage.
The investigation was immediately framed as a domestic-type homicide rooted in a prior relationship rather than a random act, but deputies and the coroner’s office withheld any deeper explanation of why the confrontation turned deadly. Early coverage stressed that a motive had not been released, and the sheriff’s office did not publicly describe any history of threats or prior incidents at the address. Reporters noted that the case remained under investigation, and beyond the initial flurry of reports about the shooting, the identification of Shrewsbury, and the announcement of Crocker’s arrest and charges, there were no widely published follow-up stories detailing a plea, trial, or conviction in the months immediately following. From what is available in public reporting, the last clear snapshot shows Crocker in custody facing serious felony charges, Shrewsbury’s death ruled a homicide by gunshot, and investigators still piecing together the private tensions that culminated in the fatal encounter.
In the aftermath, Shrewsbury’s name appears on online memorials dedicated to victims of gun violence, where the bare facts of his death are laid out in a few stark lines: his name, his age, the date, and the town where he was killed. Visitors have lit virtual candles and left messages, small gestures that suggest he was more than just another line in a police report to those who knew him. The official accounts offer only fragments of his life and final moments—an early-morning call, a rural road, a former relationship that ended in tragedy—but together they form the outline of a case in which a man and his dog were shot to death inside a home, a suspect was swiftly arrested and charged, and a community was left with unanswered questions about what drove the violence that night in Cowpens.
