‘He killed my son on behalf of the hearsay of another person’

A jury of eight women and four men found 31-year-old Kevin Tyrone Bryant guilty in the murder-for-hire death of Saequan Vereen after two hours of deliberation Thursday.

Bryant dropped his head when the verdict was read and later turned to tell his mother he loved her.

Bryant was sentenced to life in prison.

Bessie Bryant, his mother, wailed as her head dropped back at the end of her son’s two-and-a-half day murder trial.

"I know my baby didn't do it," she said with loud cries as she left the Horry County courtroom. "Oh, my baby!"

Both families in the courtroom were suffering a loss.

Minutes before, Saequan Vereen's mother, Crystal Vereen, told the court about the night her son was killed. She was on her way home from a Valentines party when she passed the police cruisers pulsing with blue lights outside of Club Levelz on the morning of Feb. 15, 2015.

She got a call that her 23-year-old son had been shot five minutes later. Then another call: he wasn’t moving. Vereen rushed to the scene and saw her son lying on the sidewalk, partially covered by a sheet.

"He killed my son on behalf of the hearsay of another person," Vereen said, calling the murder an assassination.

Vereen said another man hired Bryant to kill her son because of a rumor that he was a snitch.

"My son was a hugger... would give you pretty much anything," Vereen said. "To see him lying out there on that slab. ... It traumatized me."

Saequan Vereen graduated from Myrtle Beach High School in 2009. He went to Benedict College in Columbia for a year, then came back home.

Saequan Vereen loved to dance and had a “heart of gold,” his mother said. “He would give you the shirt off his back. Everybody loved him. Even the detective said he spoke to at least 100 people (in the investigation) and nobody had anything bad to say about him.”

Saequan Vereen was respectful, loving, a protective brother for his sisters, a caring uncle for his nephew and niece and a doting son, Vereen said. He was her only son.

She wore the bracelet he gave her on their last Christmas together and the necklace she bought bearing her son’s name to every trial proceeding.

Waiting for murder

Saequan Vereen had what seemed like a full, promising life before him, when it was stolen at 2:33 a.m. on Feb. 15, 2015.

Police say Bryant waited for Saequan Vereen to exit Club Levelz to carry out the hit he was hired to finish.

Surveillance footage showed Bryant in the club and then in the club’s parking lot at 2:20 a.m.

Police testified Bryant crouched between cars in the parking lot for several minutes, waiting for his prey, keeping put while others stepped and jumped over him as they left the club.

Then surveillance footage – played again for the jury during closing arguments – showed Saequan Vereen exiting the club with a group of other guys at 2:33 a.m. Vereen reached the void between the cars where police say Bryant was hiding and a muzzle flash ignited on the upper right corner of the screen in the video. Vereen fell forward and his killer continued to shoot as he stood over him, according to testimony.

Follow the bullet

In closing arguments Thursday morning, Assistant Solicitor Joshua Holford asked the jury to follow the evidence, specifically the bullet that was fired from a security guard’s gun at the shooter that morning.

Ronald Poston, an armed guard with Advanced Protection Services, said he fired at the shooter when he wouldn’t drop his gun and was sure he struck the suspect before he fled the scene.

That bullet from Poston’s gun matched the bullet that fell out of a gunshot wound on Bryant, who was stopped by police blocks away from the club and minutes after the shooting, Holford said.

Poston and another security guard at the club that night were taken to Bryant’s location. They testified to identifying Bryant as the shooter, but admitted under cross examination that they didn’t see the shooter’s face clearly at the time of the killing.

Defense attorney Kia Wilson pointed out to jurors in closing arguments that the surveillance footage didn’t capture the details of the shooter’s face either.

Wilson asked the jury to look at the evidence, specifically the evidence the state didn’t present during the trial.

The results of a DNA analysis on the shooter’s gun, the gunshot residue test officers performed on Bryant that night, the witnesses at the club that could have identified the shooter’s face – all of those key elements were missing, she said.

That was all information they didn’t want you to know, she told the jury.

‘Can I hug my mother?’

Before his final sentence was read, Bryant looked to Vereen’s father, mother and sister as they addressed the court. He watched silently as Crystal Vereen told the court how her son's murder turned her "whole life upside down."

"How can you kill somebody you do not know? You have no regard for life," Vereen's sister, Soraeya Vereen, told the court.

Crystal Vereen said Bryant was offered $10,000 to kill her son, but Bryant said he was never paid a dime.

Bryant grew up in Kingstree; he was a brick mason and a father of a toddler, Wilson told the court.

He has been held in detention for most of his two-year-old daughter's life, she added.

Bryant turned to address the Vereen family.

"I never got paid to kill your son, never," he said. "I never got paid any money to kill your son."

"I apologize to y'all for your loss, but I didn't do it," Bryant told the family.

In another plea, he turned to the judge, "Your honor, can I hug my mother, please?"

Fifteenth Circuit Court Judge Steven John told Bryant they would address that at another time.

"Your honor when this incident took place ... I had three more co-defendants," Bryant said. "Their charges started disappearing."

In March 2015, police charged 35-year-old Robbie Lee Bufkin of Loris with murder, the unlawful possession of a pistol and second-offense trafficking in cocaine, in the case.

According to arrest warrants, Bufkin “offered money for the murder of the victim, did hire Bryant to commit the murder and was instrumental in planning the execution-style murder.”

Bufkin’s murder and weapons charges were dropped in May as he pleaded guilty to trafficking. He was sentenced to 16 years in prison with credit for time served.

Thirty-four-year-old Tiffany Miranda Taylor of Kingstree was charged with being an accessory after the fact in the murder case earlier this year. Her case is still pending, according to online court records.

Before his sentencing, Bryant told the judge the DNA test on the murder weapon came back insufficient and his gunshot residue test came back negative.

"DNA don't lie. It wasn't my DNA on the gun," he said.

Kevin Bryant's mother, told the family, "I want to apologize for y'alls loss in y'alls life from the bottom of my heart... If I knew my son had anything to do with this boy's murder, so help me mother-to-mother, I would not be sitting in here with him every day."

The verdict and sentence took a toll on the Bryant family, news that led to wailing as his mother crumbled into the arms of a loved one that ushered her outside.

And although the trial would never give the Vereens what they so desperately wanted – another day with Saequan – the trial’s conclusion did bring a sigh of relief.

All but one of the twelve jurors, who judged the case, returned to the courtroom to hear the sentence.

“He has nobody to blame, but him and his gun and his black clothes and supposedly invisible face,” Crystal Vereen said after the trial.

This story was originally published December 8, 2016 at 7:06 PM with the headline "‘He killed my son on behalf of the hearsay of another person’."