Crime Immemorial

In the early morning hours of September 3rd, 2007, a fight broke out among a group of young people in the parking lot of a convenience store on Farrow Road in Columbia, South Carolina. Within moments, the confrontation escalated into gunfire. Several shots rang out, people scattered, and when it was over, a thirteen-year-old boy lay mortally wounded.

His name was LaKavis Henicks, whose name was also rendered as Le’Kavis or Le-Kavis in contemporary news reports. According to the Columbia Police Department, LaKavis was shot at approximately one a.m. in the parking lot of the Gaz-Bah at 6201 Farrow Road. Investigators would later emphasize one crucial point: LaKavis had not been the intended target.

LaKavis was born on February 3rd, 1994. Some of the most personal details about him emerged not from a police report, but from an essay LaKavis had written about himself. WIS-TV reported that the essay was reproduced in the program distributed at his funeral. In it, the teenager described himself as a strong young Black man and wrote about his hopes for the years ahead. He enjoyed basketball and football and imagined going to college, owning a business and eventually having a family of his own.

The events leading to LaKavis’s death appear to have begun elsewhere. Contemporary reporting indicated that a gathering or party had taken place on Fontaine Road that night. A later WLTX report, produced when Columbia police revisited the case in 2015, described people congregating at the Gaz-Bah as a nearby party at a cosmetology center was ending. By roughly one a.m., groups of young people had assembled outside the store. At some point, a confrontation developed.

The Columbia Police Department’s official cold-case summary describes it simply: there was a fight among a group of teenagers, followed by several gunshots. What might otherwise have ended as a fistfight suddenly became something far more serious when at least one person produced a firearm.

LaKavis apparently wanted no part of it. According to police evidence discussed by WIS several weeks after the killing, the thirteen-year-old was running away from the fight as it escalated. Gunfire erupted, and LaKavis was struck. Investigators determined that he had not been the shooter’s intended target. He died there in the parking lot.

In the immediate aftermath, police initially examined whether the violence might have been connected to gang activity. WIS reported that investigators initially associated the incident with a gang-related dispute originating at the Fontaine Road party. LaKavis’s father, Le-Vern Henicks, strongly rejected any suggestion that his son had been involved in a gang. He told the station that his son had good people around him and insisted that describing LaKavis as gang-affiliated was false.

Within little more than two weeks, investigators themselves had substantially revised that theory. On September 19th, 2007—sixteen days after LaKavis was killed—Columbia Police Captain Thomas Dodson told WIS that although some of the people interviewed during the investigation had gang affiliations, police no longer believed the shooting itself was gang-related. Instead, investigators viewed it as a personal fight between young men that had escalated until someone pulled a gun and began shooting.

Nothing investigators publicly disclosed suggested that LaKavis had initiated the fight, had been its target, or had any role in whatever dispute prompted the shooting. Police believed he was essentially caught in someone else’s violence.

Unlike many unsolved shootings, the Gaz-Bah homicide occurred at a business equipped with surveillance cameras. Investigators obtained video from the store, and within weeks they believed it had captured someone potentially connected to the killing.

On September 19th, police announced that they had identified what WIS described as a “strong person of interest.” Investigators said the individual was a young man at least seventeen years old who could be seen on surveillance footage from the store. Police stopped short of publicly identifying him as the gunman, however, and no arrest followed.

The problem was apparently not a total lack of evidence. Rather, investigators said they were missing the piece that could tie everything together: a witness willing to say what he or she had seen.

Interim Columbia Police Chief Harold Reaves said officers believed people who had been in the parking lot that night knew exactly what happened. Captain Dodson similarly said police possessed evidence but lacked a critical additional element. Investigators appealed to anyone who had been in the parking lot, nearby or even simply driving past the store to come forward.

For a shooting that had apparently occurred in front of numerous young people, the continuing absence of a cooperating eyewitness became one of the defining frustrations of the investigation.

In January 2015, more than seven years after the shooting, the Columbia Police Department chose LaKavis’s homicide as the first case in a new effort to draw renewed attention to the city’s unsolved crimes. Police began releasing cold-case videos through the department’s YouTube presence, hoping that publicity, and the passage of time, might convince previously reluctant witnesses to talk. But no public announcement of an arrest followed.

In September 2016, the Columbia Police Department again highlighted the case, but as of this writing a decade later, the Columbia Police Department still publicly categorizes LaKavis Henicks’s murder as unsolved.