Residents say son alerted them to deadly crime scene in their front yard
A man and his wife on Juniper Bay Road were alerted to a deadly crime scene after getting a call from their son, who was passing by early Monday morning and told them he saw a taxi cab in their front yard, according to a police report.
The man called police, telling officers he walked outside and saw the victim inside the cab that crashed into his home.
The call sparked a homicide investigation into the second shooting death of a taxi cab driver in the Conway area in less than a year.
Police say a driver for Imperial Cab, later identified as 66-year-old Dennis Mantel of the Myrtle Beach area, was shot in his taxi near the intersection of Juniper Bay Road and Dunn Short Cut Road early Monday morning.
Mantel died from a single gunshot wound at 6:45 a.m. at the Conway Medical Center, according to Horry County Deputy Coroner Darris Fowler.
Police and medics were called to Juniper Bay Road for a “possible crime scene” around 6:30 a.m.
Medics initially began to treat Mantel’s injury as a cardiac arrest, but soon noticed a bleeding gunshot wound on his neck, according to the police report. Mantel was taken to the hospital, where he was pronounced dead, the report stated.
A portion of Juniper Bay Road, extending approximately 50 yards in either direction from the home, was temporarily closed to traffic while police investigated the scene, which extended from Dunn Short Cut Road to the nearby home.
Officers said they observed the front driver’s side window of the cab had been “broken out” and a “large amount of blood inside the vehicle, mainly on the driver’s side.”
The Imperial cab was towed from the scene shortly before 10 a.m.
No gun was recovered during a search of the scene and the suspect remains at large, according to HCPD’s public information officer Krystal Dotson.
Police believe the suspect fled the scene on foot, Dotson said.
Back in November, another cab driver was shot and killed as he was sitting in his cab in Conway.
No information has been released yet on the suspect, and anyone with information is asked to call HCPD at 843-915-8477.
This story was originally published June 26, 2017 at 4:30 PM with the headline "Residents say son alerted them to deadly crime scene in their front yard."