Tyriunce Q’ mane “ToTo” Lewis was a 20-year-old man from Tylertown, Mississippi, whose life revolved around family, football weekends, and the quiet rhythms of a small town long before his name appeared in legal opinions and crime databases. He was the younger brother of Mississippi State wide receiver Jameon Lewis, and that late August weekend in 2014 began in celebration: Tyriunce had traveled to Starkville to watch Jameon and the Bulldogs dominate Southern Miss in their season opener, smiling from the stands as his brother’s team rolled to a 49–0 win. By Tuesday, Jameon was back at practice carrying a grief that coaches and reporters openly acknowledged, unsure if he could even take the field the following Saturday, the team and fanbase mourning with him for a brother who had been alive and cheering them on just days earlier.
The next morning, Sunday, August 31, 2014, the celebration unraveled in a cluster of low-rise brick buildings at Oakhurst Apartments on Dana Drive in Tylertown, a subsidized family housing complex tucked off the road but central to local life. Shortly before 11 a.m., an argument began between Tyriunce and another man, Kendall Magee, inside or just outside one of the units there. Witness accounts later summarized in news reports and court records described it simply as a disagreement that escalated, the kind of dispute that in another moment might have cooled with harsh words and distance, but instead hardened into something irreversible.
In the compressed span of that confrontation, Magee pulled a handgun. Local coverage reported that the weapon was a. 357 Magnum revolver and that the shots were close and devastating: Tyriunce was struck multiple times in the head and face, collapsing at the apartments as the Sunday quiet shattered into panic and sirens. Deputies and officers arrived to find the young man fatally wounded; by the time the initial investigation began, the altercation had already ended in a death, and word spread quickly through Tylertown that one of its own, the same man who had been in the stands in Starkville the night before, was now gone.
The other figure in that brief, violent encounter, 30-year-old Kendall Magee, did not flee far. Records describing the incident list him as the subject-suspect in the shooting at Oakhurst Apartments, noting that he was uninjured and taken into custody. Early reports said only that one man was dead and another in jail after the argument turned deadly, but the picture clarified quickly: investigators identified Magee as the shooter and booked him on a murder charge, with his status as a convicted felon adding a separate count for illegally possessing the gun he had just used. Gun violence tracking records later summarized the event in stark shorthand—date, location, one victim killed, suspect arrested—capturing in a single line the aftermath of a dispute that had ended a life and reshaped several others.
As the Lewis family buried Tyriunce at Samuel Magee Estate Cemetery in Tylertown, the criminal case against Magee moved through Walthall County’s courts. A grand jury initially indicted him for murder and for possession of a firearm by a convicted felon, with the homicide count framed as first-degree murder. Over the following year, the case shifted toward a plea: the murder charge was amended to second-degree, and on September 1, 2015, Magee stood before a circuit judge and entered guilty pleas to second-degree murder and the firearm-possession charge. A sentencing order filed two days later imposed a 35-year term in the custody of the Mississippi Department of Corrections for the murder, with ten of those years suspended and five years of post-release supervision, and an additional 10-year sentence for the gun charge, fully suspended but also followed by five years of supervision. The court ordered the sentences to run consecutively, effectively requiring Magee to serve 25 years in prison before he could begin the supervised portion of his punishment.
Magee would later insist that he had not understood what that agreement truly meant. In a series of post-conviction filings beginning in 2018, he claimed his trial attorney had misled him, allegedly telling him he would serve only six or seven years if he accepted the state’s deal. His mother and two aunts signed affidavits backing his memory of those conversations, and the Mississippi Supreme Court eventually ordered a second evidentiary hearing so that he could fully present that argument. At that hearing, however, his former lawyer flatly denied promising an early release, testifying that he had always understood—and communicated—that a 25-year sentence for second-degree murder meant 25 years to serve. The trial judge weighed conflicting testimony against the sworn statements Magee had given when he originally pled guilty, where he acknowledged knowing the potential penalties and denied that anyone had made promises to induce his plea. Finding the plea voluntary and the lawyer’s performance constitutionally adequate, the judge again refused to disturb the conviction or sentence. The Mississippi Court of Appeals affirmed that decision in 2021 and again in 2024 after further proceedings, and local reporting summarized the outcome in plain terms: the appellate courts, for the second time, upheld Magee’s conviction and the 25-year prison term that followed from the shooting that killed Tyriunce at the Tylertown apartment complex.
Outside the legal filings, the story of Tyriunce Lewis continued in smaller, more personal ways. Gun-violence memorial sites list his full name and nickname—Tyriunce Q’ mane “ToTo” Lewis—and mark August 31, 2014, as the day he was “lost to gun violence” in Tylertown, inviting friends and strangers to light digital candles in his memory. A tribute video highlighting Jameon Lewis’s plays on the football field is quietly dedicated to Journi and Brooklynn, the girls named there as Tyriunce’s children, while the comments echo with variations of “Long live Toot” and promises that his daughters will be cared for. For Mississippi State fans, his name lingers in the background of an early-season box score and the stories written that week about a player trying to run routes through grief. For his hometown, it is tied to an address—523 Dana Drive—and a Sunday morning when an argument at Oakhurst Apartments turned, with a few pulls of a trigger, into a killing that no appeal or sentence could undo.
