Two men chased another for nine miles then killed him in self-defense? | Opinion
Two men shot a man 15 times in Horry County in 2023, then were caught discussing destroying evidence and bragging that they killed him.
“I had a f------ blast,” one said during a phone call with the other. “I know it’s f----- up. ... I had a good time.”
“I feel no remorse for that dude,” the other replied.
They wanted “to know who won the prize” of delivering the kill shot. They laughed about needing to “go get tear drops,” the kind of tattoos gang members are known to get after killing someone. They shot the man on Sept. 9, 2023 — but have not been charged with a single crime.
Those are some of the facts Terri Richardson of The Sun News uncovered in a series of articles that paints a devastating portrait of not only shooters Weldon Boyd, the owner of a North Myrtle Beach restaurant, and his friend Kenneth “Bradley” Williams, but of SLED, the state’s attorney general, the Horry County Police Department and the 15th Circuit Solicitor’s Office.
Boyd and Williams have claimed self-defense.
They stood their ground the way South Carolina law says they could, the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division and the South Carolina Attorney General’s Office apparently concluded.
They supposedly stood their ground — after chasing the man for nine miles in their truck.
“I was like, ‘He just ran me off the road and aimed a gun at Bradley’s head.. F--- this guy,’ and I chased him,” Boyd said in a call to his mother. “Oh, I was on his ass, and his truck couldn’t outrun my truck, and he knew it. So, yeah he was terrified.”
Those facts came to light not from Horry County police or SLED but because the family of 33-year-old Scott Spivey of North Carolina sued Boyd and Williams for his wrongful death.
Boyd is a close friend of Brandon Strickland, who was Horry County’s deputy chief and in charge of criminal investigators at the time of the shooting.
Boyd called Strickland within 30 minutes of shooting Spivey.
The next morning, Strickland called Boyd back and said, “Now this is Brandon-Weldon never to be spoken of again. I called my people and the detectives that met with you last night, Alan Jones. ... Well, that’s who I sent out there and I called the captain over the investigations and I told him who you were. And then my next call was to [Solicitor] Jimmy Richardson … You were taken care of.”
“I was in the shadows last night,” Strickland went on. “I wasn’t there, but I was in the shadows.”
“Unofficially, you’re good to go,” he added.
In a separate call with a family member, Boyd said Strickland told him any warrants for Boyd’s arrest would have to go through Strickland.
Though long overdue, Strickland is now being investigated for his role in the shooting investigation. He resigned in March. But that’s only a part of the story.
Boyd and Williams seem to be counting on not just Boyd’s close connection to Horry County police, but that Spivey doesn’t seem a sympathetic figure. Witnesses said Spivey was driving recklessly, waving a gun. That’s why Boyd said some think they were “heroes” for killing Spivey.
No one excuses Spivey’s actions, not even his family. Still, this is the Trayvon Martin-George Zimmerman case on steroids. Zimmerman chased Martin in a now-infamous 2012 shooting that sparked the Black Lives Matter Movement. But Zimmerman only chased Martin in their neighborhood before shooting the 17-year-old Black boy.
Boyd and Williams shot Spivey after chasing him for nine miles then cried self-defense. It’s an absurd argument. They weren’t standing their ground. They got into a road rage incident and essentially went hunting and found their target nine miles down the road.
If their defense holds, none of us is safe. Get into an argument, someone can pursue us for miles — why not nine days? — then kill us. It would make a mockery of reasonable laws that rightly allow us to protect ourselves when necessary.
Here’s the kicker.
Boyd told Williams that Strickland had told him to “just be thankful that he wasn’t Black.”
Two white men who shot a white man may be counting on race to save them from consequences.
But Spivey’s white life matters, too, which is what makes the handling of this case so egregious.
This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Two men chased another for nine miles then killed him in self-defense? | Opinion."