Distrust won’t end until Myrtle Beach’s silence about a shooting does | Opinion

Horry County Solicitor Jimmy Richardson thinks that when the dust settles, and the public learns facts about the Saturday, April 26, shooting on Ocean Boulevard in Myrtle Beach that have either been withheld or are still unknown, we’ll see that it was about “a young man who really disliked a bunch of people from another town.”

Given what eyewitnesses have said, that seems a reasonable assumption.

Eleven people were injured and a teenager who shot a gun was killed by a police officer. Three officers were placed on paid administrative leave.

Myrtle Beach Police Chief Amy Prock said it has been difficult to answer questions because the investigation is being handled by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED, a standard practice when a police officer shoots someone.

Given what I know about past SLED investigations, Prock’s statement makes sense. SLED is notoriously tight-lipped, well beyond what’s reasonable. It has said it is focused primarily on officer use of force in this case.

Myrtle Beach Mayor Brenda Bethune said such shootings are not something Myrtle Beach “deals with every day” in the way large cities do. That’s plainly true. The city has had at least five shootings along Ocean Boulevard since 2021, which is astonishingly low given that it attracts millions of tourists annually, many if not most of whom visit that area.

Bethune is also “disgusted” by residents playing into the long-standing “Murder Beach” fears, especially given that violent crime rate has been falling for several years.

Even that’s a reasonable reaction by Bethune.

But a good chunk of the public doesn’t feel reassured by these facts.

This speaks to a distrust that goes well beyond what happened April 26 just before midnight, and it is a lesson that law enforcement and public officials need to learn. Quickly.

The public has good reason not to believe what our officials are telling us, even if they are telling us the truth about this shooting. None of us know. We need more answers than we’ve been given.

At the same time, officials in the Horry County Police Department are being investigated for potential misconduct in a different shooting, one in which they may have helped the shooters avoid criminal charges. Myrtle Beach and Horry County police are linked in the public’s mind. The solicitor’s office is like connective tissue. Fair or not, one officer allegedly does something untoward, it raises suspicions about everyone in the area who wears a badge.

There are plenty of residents who remember the Julian Betton case, in which a drug task force involving several area law enforcement departments shot up Betton’s department in 2015, lied about how they entered and why they shot — and avoided criminal charges while Betton received an $11.25 million settlement after being paralyzed in the raid.

The public also knows local law enforcement officials were part of a task force that spent 13 years searching for Brittanee Drexel. The 17-year-old was in Myrtle Beach on spring break when she went missing in 2009.

We later learned a sexual predator named Raymond Moody kidnapped, raped and murdered her - but not before the task force fingered the wrong men, nearly destroying their lives. They arrested one of those men for attempted kidnapping and almost pressured him into falsely confessing. When the truth emerged, law enforcement officials didn’t offer up as much as an apology or try to make amends, instead blaming Federal Bureau of Investigations agents as though local officers had no responsibility to correct the wrongs they committed and the damage they’d done.

Those are just a few of the high-profile missteps and mistakes that local elected officials were mostly silent about until forced to say or do something. At least that’s the way it could be perceived by the public.

Granted, some of the public’s distrust has little to do with what officials have said or done, and more about some people playing upon fears and magnifying them far beyond what’s decent.

But even fair-minded residents can find it difficult to accept what area law enforcement and public figures say when something like the April 26 shooting happens.

Because it feels as though local officials’ first reflex is to be as close-mouthed as they can — instead of being as transparent as possible.

Public distrust won’t end until that stops.

This story was originally published May 2, 2025 at 3:01 PM with the headline "Distrust won’t end until Myrtle Beach’s silence about a shooting does | Opinion."