Ex-Waccamaw EOC board member arrested

Former Waccamaw Economic Opportunity Council board member Abdullah Mustafa was arrested Tuesday morning and charged with holding a gun to the forehead of a woman described in an Horry County police report as both a former and current girlfriend.

The report said Mustafa had a key to the woman's Little River apartment and her car, and that he entered her bedroom at 5:30 a.m. waving a gun at the woman and a male friend, who were awakened by his appearance.

Police said Mustafa was yelling obscenities at the couple and had the gun to the forehead of one of them. When the woman's daughter, awakened by the noise, came into the bedroom and began to cry, Mustafa fled, the report said.

Mustafa was released about 5 p.m., according to the jail's website.

Mustafa could not be reached for comment Tuesday afternoon.

The woman told police that Mustafa telephoned her a few minutes after he fled the apartment and said that she would have to spend all day with her male friend because she wouldn't have a car.

She looked out the apartment's window, the report said, and saw that her car was not in its parking place.

The woman said she didn't want to press charges, but her male friend did, according to the report.

The report said the police contacted Mustafa by phone later and he denied having a gun or that he took the woman's car. He said he went to the woman's apartment to confront her about cheating on him.

Mustafa was formally removed from the Waccamaw EOC board last week when his fellow board members accepted the results of a special election in which voters said they no longer wanted him to be a member.

He was at the center of a state audit's findings earlier this year of board improprieties that included elections that didn't follow the board's bylaws and members interfering in the agency's day-to-day activities. The state Office of Economic Opportunity, which oversees the agency, called for Mustafa's removal from the board after he said he wouldn't stop the day-to-day interference.

The state was moving toward a process that would have resulted in the agency's closure. Plans had been made to serve thousands of low-income residents in Horry, Georgetown and Williamsburg counties while the process worked through and a new agency was being established.

But Mustafa's removal from the board, plans for elections of board members to replace those who resigned during the controversy and other things satisfied the state's demand for action to correct the audit's findings.