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An Orangeburg County sheriff's deputy shot and killed 35-year-old Johnathan Myron Stokes outside a pool hall and liquor store at 2424 Old Edisto Drive in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, around 2 a.m. on March 8, 2010, and County Coroner Samuetta Marshall said Stokes died at the scene of a single gunshot wound to the head.

Deputy Kevin Smith was sent to the address at 12:53 a.m. on a report of a fight and shooting at a night club, according to an incident report the sheriff's office released two days later. Sheriff Larry Williams said deputies arriving there were confronted by a large group of people fighting in the parking lot.

In the report, Smith said Stokes walked into him and started yelling, "y'all need to do your job," ignored an order to stop and ran. Smith said he chased him over a metal fence onto the side of an abandoned house, where the man turned and attacked him. Part of the report was blacked out. Williams said investigators believed Stokes took the deputy's flashlight and struck him with it repeatedly before Smith drew his service weapon and fired. Smith was treated at the Regional Medical Center for head, neck and throat injuries and released later that day.

Orangeburg County released three 911 calls from that morning under a state Freedom of Information Act request. The callers could not tell dispatchers what had happened. "To, to, to the pool hall, they shooting in the air," one woman said. Asked whether anyone had been hit, she answered, "I don't know who they done shoot." A second caller said she was inside the club and afraid to walk to her car. Asked whether people were fighting, she said, "Ah ... they killed him." None of the recordings were time stamped, and radio traffic between deputies and dispatchers was not included.

Stokes, of 162 Dena Lane, was married with two children and was known in the neighborhood as "Ron G." Friends said he had not been part of the fight and had argued with a deputy only after demanding that officers calm the crowd. "He wasn't no violent person," neighbor Clarence Busby Sr. told The Times and Democrat. Stokes' widow, Tracey, said the official account did not match the man she knew.

First Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe announced on June 1, 2010, that no criminal charges were warranted. "It's my legal opinion that SLED found no criminal action on the part of Deputy Kevin Smith," Pascoe said, referring to the State Law Enforcement Division, which investigates police shootings in South Carolina. He released the agency's report, which stated that Smith was under attack when he fired.

Residents put up a sign near the pool hall on June 7 reading, "There are more questions than answers. The more I find out, the less I know." Civil rights activist John Stroman, who helped erect it, said men who were there that night had never been interviewed and that he had asked the Orangeburg branch of the NAACP to have its attorneys review the case. Williams said he was still weighing when Smith would return to duty and had sent him to a psychologist.