‘I had a good time’ North Myrtle Beach restaurant owner says of killing North Carolina man

Jennifer Foley is silent as she listens to a recording on her laptop.

She’s sitting next to her mother, Deborah Spivey, at the dining room table in her parents’ home in Tabor City, North Carolina.

The recording is of a conversation between the two men who, just days earlier, killed her brother, Scott Spivey, in a hail of gunfire along a South Carolina highway in 2023.

“I had a f****** blast,” said Weldon Boyd, the owner of a North Myrtle Beach restaurant, in a phone call to his friend, Kenneth “Bradley” Williams, about the Sept. 9, 2023, shooting. “I know it’s f***** up. ... I had a good time.”

Both men then laugh.

“I feel no remorse for that dude,” Williams replies.

Spivey, 33, was shot and killed along Camp Swamp Road off of Highway 9 in the Longs area.

Neither man has been charged in the shooting and the death has been ruled self-defense by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office.

The conversation is among text messages and 90 audio recordings that were given to Spivey’s family in their 2024 civil lawsuit against Boyd and Williams. The tapes were later turned over to state and federal law enforcement.

SLED has launched an investigation into alleged criminal activity by a former Horry County Police officer and his involvement in the case.

On April 17, 2025, Horry County officials asked SLED and Gov. Henry McMaster to also reopen the death investigation of Spivey, citing conflicts of interest within the Horry County Police.

Foley played a handful of the recordings that she had received for The Sun News. After receiving the recordings, Foley sat down Super Bowl weekend and listened to the calls that range from the night of the shooting to days after. The conversations reveal Boyd’s connections within Horry County, including friendships with high-ranking police officers, the Solicitor’s Office and a county judge.

At one point, Boyd even declares that he and Williams will be considered heroes for shooting and killing Spivey, who was considered a “danger” on the highway.

“At the end of the day, what I want more than anything … I would love for (Boyd and Williams) to show remorse,” Foley said. “Like yeah, I shouldn’t have done that, I got caught up, and I was mad and I shouldn’t have done that.”

But Boyd makes it clear in a conversation with Williams that he has no plans to apologize because Spivey tried to kill him and “we have to play the victim.”

“What are you sad about? That it was you who lived and not him?” Boyd tells Williams.

Boyd issued a statement Sept. 12, 2023, on his personal and business Facebook pages offering his condolences and apology to the “family and friends of the person who lost his life” and “to the other motorists who were also victimized.”

‘We’re about to have a shootout’

Boyd and Williams have repeatedly claimed self-defense in the shooting.

Boyd’s attorney has declined multiple requests for comment.

Boyd also has declined to comment, but took to Facebook Apri 17, 2025, saying, “The amount of flat out lies being told are outrageous, and the amount of facts purposely not being told is comically convenient to the shooter’s family.”

The shooting death of Spivey was ruled self-defense and police said there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the two men. Police have said the shooting was the result of a road rage incident and Spivey pointing and brandishing a gun at drivers, including Boyd.

The Spivey family have alleged that Boyd’s connections within Horry County government and his close friendship with Brandon Strickland, an Horry County Police deputy chief at the time, influenced the outcome of the shooting investigation.

Strickland resigned from the Horry County Police department on March 11, 2025.

Strickland’s attorney Bert von Herrmann has said that Strickland had nothing to do with the Spivey investigation and that the conversations between him and Boyd were “more of a reflection of the type of stress, the ability to deal with the countless numbers of conflicts and an attempt to help a friend through a very tragic situation.”

The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, which reviewed the case in 2024, is investigating Strickland’s role in the shooting investigation, but has said it is not reopening Spivey’s death case.

The S.C. Attorney General’s Office made its ruling based on South Carolina’s Stand Your Ground, or Castle law, which allows individuals to use force, including deadly force, in certain situations to protect themselves and shield them from prosecution when they act in self-defense.

However, it appears from documents that neither the Attorney General’s Office nor SLED reviewed Boyd’s phone call recordings.

“At what point does the aggressor become the victim,” Foley said. “In home invasions, if someone breaks into your home and they leave, you can’t follow them, you can’t chase them. But in this case, from what the AG says, if you’re in fear for your life, you can do whatever you want to, just get in your car and do it. ... So, you can get in your car and follow someone down the road. As long as you stay in your vehicle, you’re OK.

“It’s just giving people a way to get away with justified murder.”

Foley’s theory about what happened that day is that somebody was texting and driving and that person went into another person’s lane on Highway 9.

Witnesses told police that Spivey was driving erratically that day and he had waved and pointed a gun at people, including Boyd.

Boyd followed Spivey for approximately 9 miles along Highway 9 before turning down Camp Swamp Road. He called 911 the day of the shooting, telling dispatchers, “I’ve got a guy pointing a gun at me driving. We’re armed as well. He keeps throwing the gun in our faces, acting like he’s about to shoot us. If he keeps this up, I am going to shoot him.”

Boyd again tells the dispatcher, “Listen, if he shoots at me, we’re going to put him down.”

Witnesses claim Spivey got out of his black truck holding a gun and yelled at Boyd to stop following him.

Boyd can be heard saying on the 911 call, “We’re about to have a shootout. This dude has a f****** gun. He’s got a f******* gun.”’

Williams tells Boyd to back up, and Boyd responds that he can’t. Gun fire can then be heard. When it stops, Boyd tells the dispatcher that he thinks the man is dead.

“I’m not sure why it started, or how it started, but I know that once they tried to break away, it should’ve ended,” Foley said.

‘Who won the prize’

An Horry County Police report said that bullets hit Spivey’s truck, shattering his front and back windows and came through the truck’s tailgate.

Bullets grazed his face and entered his torso, the report said. He was ultimately killed by a bullet that went under his arm, piercing his lungs.

Spivey’s father, Byron Dale Spivey, said Scott had multiple bullet holes in his body. The police report states that the truck was shot 14 to 15 times.

At one point in a phone conversation between Boyd and Williams, the two men discuss how they shot Spivey, adding that they don’t know who did the final kill shot. Boyd adds that it would later be in the police report and that his attorney said he knew the friends would want “to know who won the prize,” referring to Spivey’s death.

“It ain’t nothing to shootin’ somebody,” Boyd, who served in the military, said in the recording.

“We should go get tear drops,” he says, the two men laughing. “We’ve got to find somewhere on our bodies to put a tear drop.”

A tear drop tattoo is associated with gang and prison culture, often signifying that a person has killed someone.

Spivey had a .45 automatic in his vehicle that day. His father said he helped him load the gun. The gun holds 13 bullets, but Spivey only had 11 bullets in the gun, his father said.

Police only found one .45 shell casing outside Spivey’s vehicle. The rest were found inside, indicating that several rounds were fired from within the vehicle, the police report said.

It appears that Boyd’s white truck was never hit by Spivey’s bullets.

Multiple shell casings were found inside Boyd’s truck on both the driver’s side and passenger’s side of the vehicle. Bullet holes in the windshield showed that both men fired from inside the vehicle toward Spivey.

Boyd claims in court documents that he didn’t chase Spivey. However, in a call with his mother, Boyd says, “I was like, ‘He just ran me off the road and aimed a gun at Bradley’s head. F*** this guy,’ and I chased him. Oh, I was on his ass, and his truck couldn’t outrun my truck, and he knew it. So, yeah he was terrified.”

It appears from police reports and Boyd’s conversations that he took photos at the scene, including Spivey slumped over the console of his truck, which were turned over to police.

The two men’s cellphones weren’t collected by Horry County Police on the night of the shooting. SLED wasn’t able to retrieve the phones until more than a month after the shooting.

Boyd and Williams also talk about allegedly destroying evidence related to the case.

In a call between the two men a few days after the shooting, Boyd is heard instructing Williams to delete their chat on Facebook. Boyd also talks about how there is a “war” over the two men’s cellphones and that his attorney was going to fight the “data dump” from the phones.

Final hours of Scott Spivey

Foley has pushed for answers in her brother’s death, refusing to accept that the shooting was in self-defense. Foley filed a wrongful death lawsuit in 2024 against Boyd and Williams.

She even quit her teaching job to focus full-time on her brother’s case. Her parents, including her father, who is disabled, are not able to do it, she said.

His family recalls Scott’s final hours that day.

Spivey was at Boardwalk Billy’s in North Myrtle Beach before he headed back home that evening along Highway 9.

At about 6:04 p.m., he was dead.

The family was never contacted by police about his death until more than two hours after the shooting occurred, Foley said. They were told by a family friend about the shooting.

However, Boyd made phone calls to several people the night of the shooting, including his close friend Brandon Strickland, who was the Horry County Police deputy chief of the administration bureau, which oversees the Criminal Investigations Division.

Boyd called Strickland within 30 minutes of the shooting, asking for his friend’s help.

Boyd also had conversations with Strickland about the investigation several days after the shooting.

In a phone call with Williams, the second shooter, Boyd tells him that Strickland said to “just be thankful that he wasn’t Black.”

‘He wanted his life to mean something’

Deborah Spivey pulls out photos of her son, who played baseball in high school and went to North Carolina State University.

He was an insurance adjuster, often working to help people affected by hurricanes.

Scott Spivey coached baseball, working with underprivileged boys. He would often take his own money and buy the boys equipment, such as cleats and bats, his mother said.

“I didn’t know he was doing these things until afterwards,” Deborah Spivey said. He would ask his mother for money to pay his electric bill, and she would get on him about his spending, only to find out that he had bought equipment or taken a child to see a baseball scout.

Foley and her brother were close. She is older, but family photos show the pair as tow-headed kids hugging and playing.

His parents described Spivey as a jokester.

Foley would drive her brother to school and if he was able to get into the vehicle before her, he would change her preset radio stations to Spanish-playing music.

When Foley was a senior in high school and Scott a junior, he sold her phone number to boys standing in the lunch line. His reason? He needed cookie money that day.

“He was a funny kid,” his mother said.

Scott loved his niece and nephew and loved being an uncle, Foley said. He also loved animals, including his dog, which his parents now take care of.

“He had a problem with seeing something wrong and not doing anything about it. If he saw anything wrong, he was going to do something about it,” his mother said. “Scott told the pastor that he wanted his life to mean something and be valuable. That’s what he wanted.”

Editor’s note: The story was updated to reflect the total number of bullets in Scott Spivey’s truck. (Updated 4/21/25 at 11:40 a.m.)

This story was originally published April 21, 2025 at 6:00 AM.

Terri Richardson

The Sun News