COLUMBIA, S.C. — South Carolina is scheduled to carry out its second firing squad execution in modern history on April 11, more than two decades after the violent killing of a police captain during a multi-state crime spree, USA Today reported.
Mikal Mahdi, now 42, was convicted of the 2004 ambush and murder of Capt. James Myers, a longtime officer with the Orangeburg Public Safety Department, according to the report. Myers was shot nine times and set on fire on his own property in Calhoun County. Mahdi, then 21, stole the officer’s police vehicle and firearms before fleeing the scene, according to court records.
The attack occurred near a shed on Myers’ farmland, the same location where he had married his wife less than two years earlier, according to the report. Myers had spent the day with his wife, sister and daughter celebrating birthdays before returning home, unaware that Mahdi was lying in wait after breaking into the shed.
Mahdi’s killing of Myers followed an interstate rampage that began in Virginia and included the murder of a gas station clerk in North Carolina and a carjacking in downtown Columbia, South Carolina, according to the report. After his arrest, Mahdi confessed in a letter.
“I’m guilty as hell ... What I’ve done is irredeemable,” he wrote.
Myers, 56, began his career in public service as a firefighter in Orangeburg in 1974 and rose to the rank of police captain, according to the report. Friends and colleagues described him as a knowledgeable outdoorsman with a deep love for the land he had purchased just before his 53rd birthday.
“His quiet leadership by positive example earned the admiration and respect of his superiors, and those who served under him,” his obituary said. “Captain Myers provided ‘service above self’ to the Orangeburg community for over a quarter of a century.”
His widow, Amy Tripp Myers, testified during Mahdi’s trial, describing the emotional and physical toll of her husband’s death.
“I found the love of my life ... lifeless, lying in a pool of blood,” she said in court.
She recalled the couple’s hopes of building a life together on their property and the lasting trauma of returning to the site of his killing.
South Carolina law allows death row inmates to choose between lethal injection, the electric chair, and the firing squad, according to the report. If no choice is made, the default is the electric chair. Mahdi chose the firing squad, making him one of only five inmates in the U.S. to be executed this way since 1977.
Myers is survived by his wife, daughter, granddaughter, sister and his father.
Mahdi’s execution is scheduled to take place at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, according to the report.
