Woman pleads guilty in 2021 shooting outside Hilton Head strip club
A Bluffton woman was sentenced to prison for shooting a female in the back outside a Hilton Head Island strip club in 2021. The gunshot victim told police she and the shooter had been romantically involved with the same man.
Danielle Mariah Carpenter, 29, pleaded guilty Tuesday to a felony gun possession charge and attempted murder, receiving a six-year prison sentence for the latter offense. Attempted murder carries a maximum sentence of 30 years under South Carolina law.
Circuit Court Judge Carmen Mullen handed down the sentence Tuesday in the Beaufort County Courthouse. Carpenter also received a five-year prison sentence for her felony gun charge, court records show, but the sentence would run concurrently with her six-year term for attempted murder.
The guilty pleas marked Carpenter’s first conviction for a violent crime in Beaufort County. She had three previous convictions for drug possession ranging from 2018 to 2024, according to judicial records.
Details behind the shooting
After hearing gunshots in the area around 1:45 a.m. on May 8, 2021, Beaufort County deputies responded to the Cheetah Premier Gentlemen’s Club to find a woman with two gunshot wounds to the left and right of her spine. Police used gauze bandages to stop the bleeding before she was airlifted to Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah, according to a sheriff’s office incident report.
A man who was accompanying the gunshot victim that night identified the shooter to police as Carpenter, with whom he shared three children in common. He and the gunshot victim were standing in line waiting to enter the club when he saw Carpenter drive into the parking lot and walk toward the side of the business, he told deputies. The gunshots came moments later.
Asked if the man believed Carpenter was aiming the gunfire at him, he told police, “I felt like she was shooting at the both of us and whoever she hit she would have been content,” according to the police report.
Surveillance footage from the nightclub showed a woman, later identified as Carpenter, exiting a white SUV that had pulled into the nightclub parking lot. She lifted her hand “and a moment later a flash was present,” the report says. Carpenter climbed back into the vehicle and it exited the parking lot, turning left onto Dunnagans Alley.
Deputies used the nightclub’s surveillance footage of the white SUV to find and detain Carpenter as she drove into Bluffton shortly after the shooting. A pistol found in the car’s center console was found to be a match for the two shell casings found at the crime scene, the incident report says, and Carpenter’s passenger corroborated other witnesses’ accounts of the incident in her interview with police.
This story was originally published August 15, 2025 at 12:56 PM.
