‘Satan is on the rampage!’ Horry County battles rise in violent deaths

The wailing of saxophones and the deep, rhythmic thumping of a double bass washed over a swaying crowd at the Myrtle Beach Jazz Festival on the fringes of the Booker T. Washington neighborhood Saturday afternoon.

But the syncopated music seemed to fall with the heavy footsteps of more than 200 mourners, mostly clad in black and white, who quietly made their way to the Mt. Olive AME Church. The distant joyous jazz became a funeral dirge.

Twenty-five people have been killed in Horry County since January; four by vehicle, one by knife, 19 by gun, and nearly all by violence. This was a double funeral sparked by the falling hammer of a gun.

“You cannot retrieve a bullet once it’s gone out and that’s when my heart is broken,” said The Rev. Elizabeth Bowens, who lost her son to a shooting in 2005. “Every time I hear about another child gettin’ killed, it’s because of a bullet.”

The sanctuary and the neighboring annex were packed with mourners for the funeral of Jadasia Myers and her baby. Myers was 5-months pregnant when she suffered a fatal gunshot wound to her neck in a shooting on Spivey Avenue Sept. 24. Doctors couldn’t save the baby.

Myers was laid to rest in an open coffin at the funeral. Her baby, who was to be named Harmony, rested in a pink cloth by her side – next to a teddy bear Harmony never got to hold.

“Satan is on the rampage and enough is enough!” Bowens exclaimed three days after attending Myers’ funeral as she grieved yet another shooting disaster in Las Vegas.

Bowens was wearing a red S.C. Mother’s Against Violence shirt as she sat on a front-row seat in the Horry County Council Chambers Tuesday night. Her passion against violence was born from the death of her son, Tony Hemingway, who was killed on April 9, 2005.

More than 230 others have been killed since then in Horry County and through the organization she formed, Bowens has been there to counsel the families. She’s participated in marches, roundtable discussions and countless vigils, but Tuesday night she came to plead for the council’s support for an “end-of-walk revival.”

“It’s time to call on God,” she said. “Let’s unite together because when one hurts, all hurt. We’re hurting!”

Call to action

“Put the guns down! Put the peace sign up!” a crowd chanted at a vigil held for Myers Sept. 27 near where she was killed in Futrell Park.

The slaying of Myers and Harmony was the latest double homicide to rock the City of Myrtle Beach, but it wasn’t the only double homicide this year in Horry County. There have been three others.

And it wasn’t the first one to catapult The Rev. Tim McCray, who led the vigil, into action.

“I can do those vigils, but I know that it’s not going to stop. And I’ll see someone else (die),” McCray said. “I know tomorrow sometime I’m going to get another call that somebody got killed.”

McCray was called out to a double homicide last July when gunfire erupted once again near the park.

“When I got over to the scene, the community was in an uproar and they wouldn’t allow the police to come in” and search a house near where one of the young men had died, he said. Shortly after that, McCray and other pastors worked with the Myrtle Beach Police Department to create the Clergy Action Team: a special response unit that counsels communities and helps people understand police procedures after violent events.

But things were getting worse and McCray knew the signs.

“I experienced what we’re experiencing now with gangs when they first came on the East Coast. It was in Rikers Island and I happened to be a chaplain in the community,” said McCray, who grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. “I experienced gang violence (then) and I see what we see today.”

McCray was passing out fliers at the Carver Apartments on a Sunday afternoon in December 2015 when shots rang out.

“I … heard some gunshots but I didn’t really think it was gunshots. It was broad daylight about 3 o’clock in the afternoon,” he said. “We were handing out fliers for kids to come to the Christmas lighting and I see a young man hanging out the window shooting and (there were) kids outside.

“It devastated me,” McCray said. “When we first saw that, I said, ‘Man, it’s getting out of control.’”

McCray has been working with youth for years in Myrtle Beach. In 2016, he lost one of the kids he counseled.

Eighteen-year-old Atu Williams was killed when a gun he had been carrying accidentally went off as he was getting out of a car.

“Losing Atu last year hit me hard,” McCray said. “I felt hopeless. Nobody wanted to work with me. Everybody was just talking (instead of acting)… We didn’t have churches who wanted to open their doors to do any type of programs.”

“When your community (is) dying, that means you’re dying. Your churches are dying. Your business is dying,” he said.

A growing concern

McCray’s fight against violence in Myrtle Beach started in 2011, a year riddled with 26 murders, according to crimes reported by Horry County agencies to the S.C. Law Enforcement Division.

McCray, Bowens, other activists and community leaders marched that year from Myrtle Beach City Hall to what would become the Garden of Hope on Carver Street.

More than 140 guns were taken off the streets in a buyback program during a week-long anti-violence campaign that year, according to McCray. But many in the community were in denial about the violence and the looming threat that things could get worse, he said.

Myrtle Beach police were responding to break up a large crowd near Fifth Avenue North and Ocean Boulevard around 12:25 a.m. June 18 when gunfire erupted. Seven people were injured and six were hospitalized with non-life-threatening injuries, including the accused shooter Derias J’Shaun Little of Mt. Gilead, N.C., who police say was shot by an armed security officer on the scene.

That shooting was one of seven reported over Father’s Day weekend in the City of Myrtle Beach this year, but unlike the others - it caught the attention of the whole country.

Bubba Hinson, a volunteer firefighter in town for the S.C. Fire-Rescue Convention, was relaxing on his hotel balcony when he said he noticed a mass of people stalling traffic on Ocean Boulevard that night. When some in the crowd started to dance in the traffic, he pulled up Facebook Live and started to record.

The video captured the shooting, responding officers fleeing for cover under a hail of bullets and the wounded alleged shooter hijacking a car in his failed escape. The video went viral. The story made national headlines.

City leaders responded with extra police, barricades on the boulevard, lighted signs to remind visitors of the many cameras always watching, but the word was already out.

The Rev. Carmin Leach told the crowd at Myers’ funeral that a stranger on a recent trip to Detroit, Mich., mentioned how dangerous Myrtle Beach had become.

“That hurts you,” she told the congregation, many of whom work in the hospitality industry.

Tourism took a nosedive after the Ocean Boulevard shooting. Occupancy rates at hotels plummeted, sales dropped and nearly every hotel along the boulevard had vacancy signs illuminated during an unusually quiet Fourth of July holiday.

Organizing the community

Long before the Ocean Boulevard shooting gained worldwide attention, police, local governments and community leaders had already started putting things in place to combat the violence.

“We strongly believe that the solutions are found not just in action steps by law enforcement but by working together with our community and our law enforcement partners,” said Myrtle Beach Police Chief Amy Prock.

Law enforcement partners from across the state came to assist MBPD with increased patrols and visibility over the summer. Prock’s department deployed specialized teams to address major calls for service and traffic concerns. And they put more eyes on the city’s camera system to give officers real-time information as potential problems were brewing.

Violence had become such a concern in Horry County by February 2016 that the county’s Public Safety Committee created a new Community Violence Subcommittee to study the issue.

After 15 meetings over a span of 16 months and countless hours of research and brainstorming, the group came up with a 6-point approach to stemming the violence.

• Prevention/Intervention - steering at-risk youth away from violence
• Enforcement - focusing on repeat offenders, troubled areas
• Prosecution - working with state and federal prosecutors to make sure the most violent offenders and repeat violent offenders are punished to the fullest extent of the law
• Community - helping young people access faith-based groups and mentors
• Social needs - focusing on social programs to foster positive relations
• Resources - harnessing grants, partnerships and other resources available to support these initiatives.

“This is a great approach,” Prock told the subcommittee when her department was invited to attend its last meeting on Sept. 20. “It’s not just about Myrtle Beach and it’s never just been about Myrtle Beach for me. This is our entire community. We as a community, as a family, need to get involved to make a difference.”

Tom Fox, chief deputy of the Horry County Sheriff’s Office, who led the group’s meeting, suggested they create six more subcommittees to iron out the intricacies of each point. A workshop to finalize their findings to present to the Public Safety Committee was scheduled for October.

But a new sense of urgency surfaced with the slaying of Myers and Harmony on Sept. 24, four days after the meeting.

“We’re not just talking. We’re not marching,” McCray said. “I’m not just sitting at the table with leadership … (to) just continue talking. I’m ready. We’re going to do something about it.”

McCray has a plan. Some of it’s happening already.

“We have to do it now. It’s an emergency call,” he said.

Some of it will require government support.

McCray leased an office in April for $1 a year in a Myrtle Beach apartment clubhouse that has been reborn as the Phoenix Empowerment Center.

He has 11 outreach programs so far, focusing on guiding and empowering youth, parents and people throughout the community.

McCray has partnered with neighborhood leaders and businesses to create an S.O.S. (Save Our Streets) chapter in Myrtle Beach. Modeled after the S.O.S. in Brooklyn, McCray partnered with neighborhood businesses like barber shops and salons to meet people “where they’re at” in efforts to deter violence.

But he has also partnered with agencies like the Department of Social Services (DSS), Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ), the 15th Circuit Solicitor’s Office and Waccamaw Mental Health to provide services at his Myrtle Beach office.

Kids, who get in trouble at school, “can come here and get assessed. We can work with those agencies so now instead of them going to Conway, DSS can come here, DJJ can come here,” McCray said. “We take the barriers off of everybody now because we have the partnerships.”

His center has programs for parents to help fix what he sees as a broken-home crisis that leads kids to violence and mentors are assigned to follow each at-risk youth to lessen the threat of losing a kid shuffled back and forth between agencies.

McCray also plans to ask Myrtle Beach leaders about potential tax incentives for businesses willing to help their efforts and offer jobs to the ones they train.

He plans to seek the state government’s support in freeing up funds to attain rehabilitative health specialist services to help people battling mental health issues.

“If we can get the workforce and the (rehab) services combined, we can save a lot of people in this area,” McCray said. He’s seen it work in Brooklyn.

“Tragedy comes to unite us for some reason,” McCray said. “We’re not waiting on someone to give us something to take back our community, we’re going out there and you’ll see me out there knocking on doors and building relationships meeting them right where they’re at.”

Elizabeth Townsend contributed to this report.

This story was originally published October 6, 2017 at 3:43 PM with the headline "‘Satan is on the rampage!’ Horry County battles rise in violent deaths."