Damarion Nealy pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Gregory Johnson II.

CONWAY, S.C. — A Loris teenager was sentenced after admitting he fired the shot that killed his 20-year-old uncle during a June 2025 encounter involving a pistol near Conway, prosecutors said.

Damarion Nealy, 18, pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter in the death of Gregory Johnson II, according to the 15th Judicial Circuit Solicitor’s Office. Nealy was 17 when the shooting happened. A judge sentenced him under South Carolina’s Youthful Offender Act, meaning his prison term cannot exceed five years. The plea ended a case built around a narrow set of facts: a gun was passed inside a vehicle, the teen pointed it toward Johnson’s head, and one shot killed him.

The shooting happened June 1, 2025, in Horry County, after Johnson had been firing a pistol at deer from the driver’s seat of a vehicle, prosecutors said. Johnson then handed the pistol to Nealy and asked whether he wanted to take a shot. Prosecutors said Nealy was too young to legally handle the gun at the time. They said he took it, pointed it at Johnson’s head and had his finger on the trigger with enough pressure to fire. The round struck Johnson in the head. Nealy left the scene afterward, and Johnson died a short time later. Violent Crimes Assistant Solicitor James D. Stanko said the evidence supported an involuntary manslaughter charge. “We feel this was a fair resolution to these tragic events,” Stanko said.

Early reports from Horry County placed the shooting near South Carolina Highway 905 in the Conway area. Police were called around 12:30 a.m. Sunday after a report of shots fired, and Johnson was found with a head wound near the back of a residence. He was pronounced dead at the scene in early local reports. Authorities later said Johnson had been sitting in a vehicle outside his home when he was shot. Nealy was arrested the same day, around 3 p.m., and was charged as a 17-year-old with involuntary manslaughter. Booking information later listed him at the J. Reuben Long Detention Center with a $100,000 bond. At that stage, investigators had released few details about why the gun was pointed toward Johnson. The later plea account filled in the central sequence that prosecutors relied on at sentencing.

The case turned less on a dispute than on prosecutors’ description of reckless handling of a firearm. Officials did not say Nealy intended to kill Johnson. They said he later admitted to police that he was holding the weapon when it fired, describing that the gun “went off.” The solicitor’s office said Nealy’s age made the handling itself unlawful. The charge of involuntary manslaughter in South Carolina generally applies when a death results from criminal negligence or unlawful conduct that does not rise to murder. In this case, prosecutors pointed to the direction of the muzzle, the finger on the trigger and the discharge as the facts that led to the guilty plea. Unknowns remain outside that account, including whether anyone else was nearby at the exact moment of the shot and what Nealy did between leaving the scene and his arrest.

Johnson’s death left a family mourning a young man who had been trying to build work and plans close to home. His obituary said he had recently started a landscaping business with his father to supplement his income. It described an entrepreneurial streak and said he had talked about projects around the family property, including rebuilding his grandmother’s old barn, renovating a shed and adding to his house. Public memorial pages described him as funny, outgoing, hardworking and close to his family. The details gave prosecutors’ legal summary a sharper human frame: the victim and defendant were not strangers, and the shooting did not happen in a public confrontation. It happened within a family setting, during a moment officials described as careless and unlawful.

Nealy’s sentence under the Youthful Offender Act set a ceiling rather than a longer adult prison term. The act can be used for certain young defendants and allows the court to impose a sentence aimed at punishment and rehabilitation within defined limits. Prosecutors said the facts and evidence made involuntary manslaughter the proper charge under the circumstances. That statement also signaled what the case was not, based on the record made public: prosecutors did not present it as a planned killing, and they did not describe evidence of a prior threat. The plea spared both sides a trial over the exact mental state behind the shooting while still producing a felony conviction and prison exposure. Court officials did not announce a later sentencing hearing because the plea and sentence were resolved together.

The public record shows the case changed from a sparse arrest report into a fuller account at the plea stage. In June 2025, local reports said police accused Nealy of pointing a firearm at Johnson before the shot. By April 2026, prosecutors said Johnson had been firing at deer, handed the weapon to Nealy and asked whether he wanted to shoot. That added detail became the center of the final story. It also underscored how quickly the night turned from a rural shooting scene into a homicide investigation. A vehicle, a pistol, a deer in the woods and a single sentence between relatives became the facts later repeated in court.

For Johnson’s relatives, the sentence did not restore the plans listed in his obituary or the work he had started with his father. For Nealy, the plea changed his status from accused teen to convicted young offender facing prison time. The solicitor’s office framed the outcome as a legal resolution to a family tragedy, not as a disputed verdict. The next milestone is Nealy’s confinement and any supervision decisions made under the Youthful Offender Act.

Author note: Last updated May 7, 2026.