Horry County solicitor has eroded public trust with botched shooting probe | Opinion

Jimmy Richardson knows the public is losing trust in those sworn to protect them.

“I certainly understand the distrust and where it is coming from,” the 15th Circuit solicitor said.

It’s coming from ugly revelations that the Horry County Police Department, or at least a few police officers, may have covered up the fatal shooting of Scott Spivey of North Carolina. If it wasn’t a coverup, it was incompetence of the highest order.

Two men chased Spivey in a truck for nine miles after an alleged road rage incident. They then shot him dead. That was nearly two years ago. Neither of them has been arrested or charged. The men claimed self-defense and will try to establish immunity from criminal or civil charges in a stand your ground hearing next month. If a judge grants that absurd interpretation of an already-extreme law, it will be open season on every South Carolina citizen, and everyone who dares visit this gun-saturated state.

One of the men who did the killing, North Myrtle Beach restaurant owner Weldon Boyd, is friendly with the police department. Former Deputy Chief Brandon Strickland is being investigated for his role in the botched investigation of the shooting, though “investigation” seems not quite the right word for how the department handled the incident. A 5-year-old would have asked more-probing questions.

Another officer, Paul Damon Vescovi, is on video seeming to suggest Boyd should “act like a victim” because they were being recorded. He was terminated for “conduct unbecoming of an officer.” A few other officers are also under investigation, including for “mislabeling” evidence not made public until Spivey’s sister sued and forced the department’s hand.

The department either didn’t know or care that Boyd had recorded several phone calls in which he incriminated himself, including bragging about shooting Spivey, and that he even expected to be called to Columbia to be celebrated as a Second Amendment hero. But the department should have known. And it should have cared. The office didn’t do basic due diligence, and that was to confiscate the phones of the two men who had just killed someone, Boyd and his friend Kenneth “Bradley” Williams.

I asked Richardson why in the few days his office had the case before he recused himself, handing it to state law enforcement officials, he hadn’t ensured that basic investigative step had taken place.

“We don’t collect evidence,” he said of the solicitor’s office. “I don’t know why they didn’t collect the electronics the night of the shooting. At some point [maybe two or three days later], I found out they didn’t have the phone and I asked them to get it.”

That’s simply not good enough.

Richardson is the top law enforcement official for Horry and Georgetown counties. He doesn’t get to make excuses. He doesn’t get to say I don’t know. This happened on his watch.

Even his decision to push the case up to the State Law Enforcement Division and state Attorney General Alan Wilson to avoid a potential conflict of interest does not exonerate him.

“The attorney general’s [office] is very capable and in a much better position to review SLED’s findings once their investigation is over,” Richardson told me.

And yet, neither SLED nor Wilson’s investigation uncovered the damning evidence made public because of a lawsuit. That’s why this thing stinks to high heaven. That’s why the public has every reason to have misgivings about everything each of these law enforcement agencies says.

This case is about a man being shot to death after he was chased for nine miles. But the investigation at every level treated it as though it was about a police officer sneakily helping a buddy make a parking ticket vanish.

And that’s why Richardson, Horry County Police Chief Kris Leonhardt, and other local leaders should be spending more time before the public answering every question asked of them — no matter how hostile or pointed — apologizing and explaining why this will never happen again.

That hasn’t happened. We’ve only gotten contrived and carefully-worded press conferences and press releases — and the area’s top law enforcement official doing little to reassure an anxious public which he knows has good reason to have little confidence in a system he sits atop.

This story was originally published May 16, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Horry County solicitor has eroded public trust with botched shooting probe | Opinion."