Warrants detail Horry County homicide that police, coroner stayed silent on
About 5 a.m. on June 17 bullets riddled the passenger side of a Jeep traveling on Highway 9 in Longs. The shooter, riding in a separate car, drove away.
Chaquan Bellamy, 26, was killed.
Almost two months later an arrest was made in Tabor City, North Carolina, just north of the state border. Jaylon Hemingway, 18, is charged with murder, possession of a weapon during a violent crime and discharging a firearm into a dwelling. He is being held in J. Reuben Long Detention Center without bond.
After the shooting Horry County police tweeted that there was a shooting, a usual practice for the department. However, they did not mention that it was a homicide.
The Horry County Coroner’s Office didn’t publicly identify the body until last week after receiving questions from The Sun News.
When asked over the phone about the identity of the homicide victim and why the coroner’s office did not put out a news release — which is typical with homicide victims — Horry County Coroner Robert Edge initially said his records showed nobody was killed on June 17 — or on the following two days.
Edge then reviewed his records a second time and made a call to The Sun News. Edge determined that Bellamy was killed on June 17. Bellamy died from a single gunshot wound to the head, Edge said.
“Might have been one that slipped through the cracks,” Edge said Friday, speaking on why no press release was put out about Bellamy’s killing. “It’s a slip-up is all I can tell you.”
The shooting
Police records show that three Horry County police officers responded to a reported shooting on the 700 block of Freemont Road in Longs on June 17. Officers found Bellamy lying in the driveway next to a dark blue Jeep Latitude that was still running. The Horry County Coroner’s Office also responded to the scene, according to an Horry County police report.
A police officer reached into the cab of the Jeep, turned off the ignition and placed the car key in the driver’s seat, according to the incident report.
“No other manipulation of the vehicle was performed,” the police report said. A police officer collected information from the car’s driver and two other witnesses.
All information relating to the Bellamy was redacted from the police report. Additionally, about seven lines of text from the narrative portion of the incident report were completely redacted.
‘No threat to community’
On June 17, the Horry County Police Department tweeted about a shooting in the Freemont Road area that occurred about 5:30 a.m. The tweet stated that one person was shot. “There is no threat to the community,” the tweet stated.
The Sun News sent a series of questions via text message to Mikayla Moskov, spokesperson for the Horry County Police Department. Questions included why the homicide was not mentioned in the tweet about the shooting and why police told the public there was no threat to the community.
“An incident can’t be classified as murder until there’s evidence that the death occurred with malice aforethought. A shooting that has just occurred is simply a shooting,” Moskov wrote in a text message.
Earlier this year, Moskov told The Sun News that when Horry County police say there is no threat to the community, that typically means a shooting was accidental or self-inflicted.
“What I have mentioned about accidental and self-inflicted shootings previously is that, unless there was another person involved or a community risk, we typically don’t even tweet them out,” Moskov said Thursday.
“You can generally assume that, if HCPD notes something is fatal, it’s either because the coroner confirmation and notification has already occurred, or there was a community risk.”
This story was originally published August 12, 2021 at 10:24 AM.
