Witness accounts helped prosecutors reconstruct the minutes before Tyquirez Sims was shot outside his Spartanburg home in August 2023.
SPARTANBURG, S.C. — The confrontation that eventually sent Zaria Aiyanna Owens to prison began as a dispute over leaving an apartment, moved toward a parked car and ended with 21-year-old Tyquirez Rashad Sims fatally shot on a sidewalk as Owens’ young son stood nearby.
That sequence, reconstructed through witness accounts, Owens’ statements and evidence presented by prosecutors, became the core of a weeklong Spartanburg County trial in July 2026. Jurors convicted Owens, now 25, of voluntary manslaughter and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. The court sentenced her to 21 years on the manslaughter conviction and five years on the weapons charge, with the shorter sentence reported as concurrent. The verdict came almost three years after the Aug. 22, 2023, shooting at the College Pointe Lane apartment complex.
Shortly before 9 p.m. that August night, Owens and Sims were arguing. A friend told investigators that Owens had been living with Sims but Sims was making her move out, prosecutors said. During the dispute, Sims realized that Owens had his cellphone and his gun. He followed her as she went toward her vehicle because he wanted the items back. The disagreement that had started around the end of their living arrangement was now taking place outside with Sims’ firearm in Owens’ possession.
Prosecutors said Owens pointed the gun at Sims during the argument. Sims responded not by remaining beside her car but by going back toward the apartment. He returned with Owens’ 3-year-old son and brought the child to his mother’s vehicle so she could take the boy and leave, according to the state’s account. That movement became one of the case’s most important details because both the prosecution and Owens agreed that the child was with Sims immediately before the gunfire, even though their descriptions of what happened next differed.
A witness told investigators that Owens raised her arm toward Sims. The state said she fired as Sims stood several steps away on or near a curb. Sims was hit once and collapsed outside the apartment complex. Owens then took her son and left in her vehicle. Deputies who arrived at College Pointe Lane found Sims on the sidewalk with a gunshot wound and no signs of life. The Spartanburg County Coroner’s Office identified him, and he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The immediate police response continued elsewhere in Spartanburg after Owens left. Investigators interviewed people at the complex and developed Owens as the suspect. Authorities found the vehicle associated with her at another apartment complex inside the city limits, but Owens was not arrested there. Instead, she went to the Spartanburg County Sheriff’s Office early the next morning and surrendered. She was 23 at the time and lived in Moore, according to reports issued when the case began.
Her interview with investigators added another version of the seconds before Sims was shot. Owens attempted to claim self-defense, authorities said. She described reaching for her son as Sims brought the child toward her and said Sims pushed the boy in her direction, causing him to stumble. Owens acknowledged that she then picked up Sims’ gun and shot him. Deputies later checked the child and found that he had not been injured when he stumbled, according to prosecutors.
The sheriff’s office rejected the self-defense explanation in its first public account of the investigation. Officials said witness statements, forensic evidence and inconsistencies in Owens’ statements did not support that claim. She was arrested on a murder charge and a charge of possessing a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. At the trial almost three years later, the jurors were presented with the same fundamental conflict: Owens acknowledged firing the weapon, while the prosecution argued that the physical circumstances and witness accounts did not establish the justification she had asserted.
The final verdict did not mirror the original murder accusation. After hearing the case, the Spartanburg County jury found Owens guilty of voluntary manslaughter and the weapons offense. The distinction matters to the history of the proceeding because the charge announced after the shooting was murder, while the homicide conviction that emerged from the trial was voluntary manslaughter. The available reporting does not establish the jury’s private reasoning, and jurors’ deliberations should not be reconstructed from the verdict alone.
The trial also brought renewed attention to details that were only partly known during the 2023 investigation. Prosecutors said Sims had recently become a father and had a 6-month-old child when he was killed. Owens’ son, who was 3 according to the trial reporting, was present for the final confrontation. Deputy Solicitor Spenser Smith said after the verdict that the death had affected two families and two young children. He described Sims as having a loving family and noted that the young father had been killed only months after the birth of his child.
The children occupied different places in the case but reflected the consequences described by prosecutors. Sims’ infant was not part of the confrontation but lost a father. Owens’ son was brought outside while the adults were arguing and was there when the shooting occurred. The state emphasized those facts in discussing the impact of the crime after the verdict. The child’s identity has not been published in the reports reviewed for this story, and there is no need to identify him to explain his role in the events presented at trial.
Earlier coverage also shows how the case developed from an uncertain nighttime investigation into a prosecution built around a detailed chronology. On Aug. 22, deputies initially knew that a young man had been found shot outside an apartment complex near the University of South Carolina Upstate campus. By the next afternoon, authorities had named Sims as the victim, announced Owens’ surrender and said her self-defense account conflicted with evidence and witness statements. What remained unresolved at that point was how those facts would ultimately be judged in court.
That answer did not arrive until July 2026. The trial began early in the week, and jurors returned their verdict Thursday, July 16. Owens was sentenced to 21 years for voluntary manslaughter. The court also imposed a five-year term for the weapons conviction. Detailed reports citing the Seventh Circuit Solicitor’s Office state that the five-year term runs at the same time as the 21-year sentence. Although one local headline described the sentence as 26 years, the reported concurrent structure leaves the effective term at 21 years.
The outcome closes the trial phase of a case that began with a single gunshot outside College Pointe Lane and an overnight effort to locate the suspected shooter. The key facts ultimately presented to jurors were not that Owens and Sims had merely argued, but that Owens had Sims’ gun, Sims went back for her child, the two were separated by several steps when the shot was fired and Owens left before surrendering the next morning. Those details supplied the framework within which the jury considered her self-defense claim and the prosecution’s competing account.
Owens remains convicted of voluntary manslaughter and the weapons offense under the sentence imposed after the jury’s decision. The sources reviewed for this report do not identify a later ruling overturning the convictions or changing the concurrent sentencing arrangement. For Sims’ family, the verdict arrived nearly three years after deputies found the 21-year-old outside his apartment; for Owens, it converted a 2023 murder prosecution into a lengthy prison term following her manslaughter conviction.
Author note: Last updated August 23, 2026.