After latest Hilton Head shooting, local leaders call gun violence a ‘crisis’
On Oct. 12, gunfire erupted between two feuding groups at Willie’s Bar and Grill, a watering hole on rural St. Helena Island, with bullets striking 20 and killing four.
The tragedy sparked emotional prayer vigils across Beaufort and the Sea Islands, calls for change and the bar’s closure. Today, Anferny Devon Freeman, a 27-year-old St. Helena man, is facing multiple charges in connection with the deadly mass shooting. Kashawn Glaze, 22, Beaufort, whom authorities identified as another shooter, was killed in the exchange of gunfire.
Then, on July 4, less than nine months after the tragedy, a hail of gunfire rang out across the Lowcountry coast again, this time on Coligny Beach on Hilton Head Island, 25 miles to the south of St. Helena. Nobody died, but eight people were injured.
Four suspects in the Hilton Head beach shooting also hail from St. Helena: Jayden Hawes, 18, and Marcello Royal and Quazeir Davis, both 17, are charged with attempted murder. Christopher Capers, 17, is facing a charge of accessory after the fact.
“They didn’t learn their lesson,” Sarah Reynolds Green said of the latest shooting.
St. Helena Island residents like Green are watching the Hilton Head case closely, with Beaufort County’s second brazen shooting spree in less than a year raising more alarm bells about young people settling disputes with guns.
The availability of guns
Green and her husband, Bill Green, run a summer school program on St. Helena Island that teaches trades, moral values and entrepreneurship through Gullah cooking and farming.
“It’s sad,” Green said. “It’s very telling of the times we’re living in, the homes these children are living in.”
Those times, says Green, are marked by easy availability of guns that can be modified to massacre people, a willingness to use them and a pervasive attitude among some young people that there is no other means of communicating except through violence.
“That’s problematic,” Green said.
Green recognized one of the St. Helena teenagers who was charged in the Hilton Head shooting.
If young people feel as if the only means of correcting an injustice is with a gun, Green says, it tells us “how far gone our youth are.”
“What happened to words?” she says. “What happened to communication.”
Poverty is part of the problem, Green said. Education, she adds, is a gateway out but must align with a trade, or a way to earn a living, or kids will “go astray.”
Many factors are contributing to the violence and recklessness, Green said. Parents, she said, need a little more support in raising kids from the community.
At a community meeting on Hilton Head Thursday to discuss solutions, loud applause rang out when it was recommended that an 8 p.m. curfew be established for juveniles. That recommendation came after a video was shown at the meeting. The video was made by young people partying on the beach and later posted on social media.
Teenagers on the beach has been a problem for a long-time, said Steve Alfred, a member of the Town Council who also said more “boots on the ground” are needed on the town’s beaches.
The suspects in the Hilton Head shooting, said Robert Adams, executive director of St. Helena-based Penn Center, which was once a school for recently freed slaves, are “not unknown on the island.”
“These are individual choices these young people are making and folks have spoken directly to these young people to get them to go another way,” Adams said. “But I wonder what else we could be doing.”
More support needed for St. Helena youth
Adams sees a need for more support for youth on St. Helena “to facilitate productive maturation.” That includes more anti-violence programs, opportunities for professional growth and sports facilities.
“Our job is to help them find the right pathway,” Adams said. “That’s what I think about when I see these types of events.”
The shootings are obviously a tragedy for those who are wounded or killed and their families, Adams said.
They also end up wasting of the lives of those who are convicted in the shootings.
“Life is lost on both sides of those guns,” Adams said.
Sandra Boyd, executive director and Founder of De Gullah St. Helena Island Preservation Project (SHIPP), called the devastating impact of gun violence in Beaufort County a crisis “we can no longer afford to meet with passive concern.”
“Having faced the agonizing, personal tragedy of losing my own grandson to this violence, I know firsthand the shattered peace and profound grief that too many of our families are enduring,” Boyd said. “Beyond statistics, this is a profound loss of our community’s future, and it demands immediate, unified action.”
To break the cycle, Boyd said, heavy investment in youth is necessary before tragedy strikes. Gullah SHIPP is a collaborative of community business owners, volunteers, nonprofit organizations and elders that provides mentorship, mental health services, and sustainable support systems to young people, from early intervention to programs for older youth who did not get critical support early on.
“We must say no more to the bloodshed; too many lives have already been lost,” Boyd said. “We are calling on the entire community to stand with us in supporting the future of our youth.”
This story was originally published July 9, 2026 at 10:46 AM.
