State of South Carolina has executed death row inmate Michael Moudy. Moudy chose death by firing squad. >> Moudy was convicted of killing an off-duty police officer in 2004. He is now the second South Carolina death row inmate to be executed by firing squad. >> At 6:01 in the evening on April 11th, 2025, inside the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, a prison guard placed a black hood over a man’s head.

Across the room, behind a wall with three small rectangular openings, three volunteers stood with rifles loaded and aimed at a white cloth target pinned directly over the man’s heart. 30 seconds passed. The shots rang out. The man cried out. His arms flexed violently. He groaned. And for the next 80 seconds, the witnesses watched in silence as his chest continued to rise and fall.

As a man who was supposed to be dead kept breathing. At 6:05 in the evening, a doctor stepped forward and confirmed what the witnesses already suspected. Michael Dean Moudy was dead. He was 42 years old. He had been on death row for 19 years. Uh he had been convicted of one of the most cold-blooded, calculated killings in South Carolina’s modern history.

 The ambush and murder of an off-duty police captain whose body was then doused in diesel fuel and set on fire on the same piece of land where the man had gotten married. But here is what nobody in that witness room knew yet. Less than a month after the execution, an autopsy would reveal something that would shake legal scholars, death penalty advocates, and ordinary people across the country.

The shooters had largely missed his heart. and the man who was supposed to die quickly, cleanly, humanely, had almost certainly spent 30 to 60 seconds in excruciating conscious pain before his body finally gave out. In this video, we are going to walk through everything. Mekal Mahdi’s childhood, and the crime spree that began in Virginia and ended in a South Carolina shed.

The man he ambushed and burned, the trial, 19 years on death row, the execution, and the autopsy that turned a closed case into an open question. Stay with me, because this story does not go where you expect. Before we talk about what Mekal Mahdi did in the summer of 2004, we need to understand where he came from.

Not to excuse anything that follows. Nothing that follows is excusable. But because the full picture is the only honest way to tell this story. Mekal Dean Mahdi was born on March 20th, 1983, in Virginia. He grew up in Lawrenceville, a small, quiet town in Brunswick County, where not much happened.

 His father, who had converted to Islam and taken the name Sharif, came from a fractured background himself. A history of alcoholism in the family. No high school diploma. A stint in the Marines that ended honorably. And then, at 27 years old, a marriage to a 16-year-old girl from Richmond. They had two sons together.

 Salem first, then Mekal. By 1986, when Mekal was just 3 years old, his mother was gone. She left. And his father, rather than telling the boys the truth, told Mekal that his mother had died. That she was dead. That she had not chosen to leave. She was simply gone. McCall would grow up carrying a grief that was built on a lie.

By 1991, when McCall was 8 years old, Sharif couldn’t manage anymore. He split the brothers up. Salem was sent to an aunt in Texas. McCall was sent to live with a paternal uncle and aunt in Maryland. In Baltimore, McCall enrolled at Scotts Branch Elementary School. On the surface, he engaged.

 He was described by some teachers as active and curious. But, the reports underneath told a different story. Low self-esteem, difficulty with authority, reading and writing well below grade level, genuine trouble forming relationships with other children. He dropped out in third grade. He was 9 years old. Here is a detail that surfaced years later in court filings, a detail that lingers.

When McCall was 9 years old, he told his teacher he wanted to shoot himself. A 9-year-old boy told his teacher he wanted to die. The system heard it, noted it, and moved on. What makes this story complicated, and you need to sit with the complication, is that despite all of that, despite a childhood fractured from the very first years, by the time McCall Muhammad was 21, he had earned his GED and completed community college coursework.

He did not completely give up on himself, at least not at first. He tried. But, in 2001, at 18 years old, he attacked a police officer in Virginia. He was convicted and sentenced to 93 months in prison, along with 15 years of probation. He was released in May of 2004. He was 21 years old. He He served his time. He walked out into the world.

Two months later, three people were dead. Now, let’s talk about what Mikael Mahdi did in the summer of 2004. Because when you lay it out in sequence, day by day, state by state, the deliberateness of it, the cold forward momentum is what stays with you. This was not a single moment of rage. This was a progression, each day an escalation, each day someone else paid.

Day one, Virginia. July 14th, 2004. Brunswick County, Mahdi’s home county, the place where he grew up. Sometime on or around this date, Mahdi was involved in a drug deal that went violently wrong. A man died. Mahdi confessed to this killing years later, but because of the murder convictions that followed in other states, he was never formally charged or tried for this death.

For over two decades, that first victim remained largely unknown to the public. It was only in 2025, the year of Mahdi’s execution, that the Virginia killing was confirmed and disclosed publicly. After it happened, Mahdi did what people do when they have just crossed a line they cannot uncross. He ran. He stole a neighbor’s gun.

 He stole a station wagon. He headed south. Day two, North Carolina. July 15th, 2004. Winston-Salem. Mahdi walked into a convenience store. The clerk on duty was 29 years old. His name was Christopher Jason Boggs. A just a young man doing his job, checking IDs, running the register, moving through an ordinary Tuesday in a way that people do when they have no idea it is their last ordinary Tuesday.

He was checking Mahdi’s ID, a routine unremarkable moment, when Mahdi pulled a weapon and shot Christopher Boggs twice in the head. Boggs died. Mahdi walked out of the store without the money from the register because he couldn’t get it open, got back in the stolen station wagon, and kept moving south.

 29 years old, he never made it to 30. Day three, South Carolina. July 17th, 2004, Columbia, South Carolina. It is 3:30 in the morning. A man named Corey Pitts is sitting at the intersection of Bull Street and Washington Street. He glances down to find a CD in his car. He looks back up and finds a gun in his face.

 Amadi took his red Ford Expedition, swapped the license plates with those on the stolen station wagon, and drove away. He now had a new vehicle, a new momentum, and was moving deeper into South Carolina. Not long after, Mahdi pulled into a Hess gas station in Calhoun County. He spent at least 45 minutes there struggling to get gas with a rejected credit card, feeding it into the pump over and over, trying different numbers, killing time while the clerk behind the register watched him and grew more suspicious.

Eventually, the clerk called the police. Mahdi saw it happening. He fled on foot, ran less than a mile through the South Carolina heat, and found a shed at the edge of a rural property. He broke in. He found guns inside, a rifle, ammunition. He settled in. He waited. He had been running for 3 days across three states with three victims behind him, and now he was hiding in someone else’s shed, holding someone else’s guns, waiting for whatever came next.

 He had no idea whose property he was on. He was about to find out. James Myers was 56 years old. He had given 30 years of his life to public service in Orangeburg, South Carolina. 30 years that began in 1974 when he joined the Orangeburg Department of Public Safety as a firefighter, working 24 hours on and 48 off.

 The kind of schedule that gave him long stretches at home with the people he loved. Over the decades, he had moved up through the ranks, earned his captain’s bars, developed the quiet authority of a man who led by example rather than by volume. His obituary would say it plainly, his quiet leadership by positive example earned the admiration and respect of his superiors and those who served under him.

Captain Myers provided service above self to the Orangeburg community for over a quarter of a century. His daughter, Meredith Barnett, described a father who was present in all the ways that matter. Teaching her to hunt and fish and garden. Building fires with her and watching the flames, spending the long stretches of his off days doing things with his only child that she would carry forever.

She called herself his unabashed daddy’s girl. He was wise beyond his years, she would say. He was the perfect son, a gem of humanity. In the years before July 2004, something good had happened to James Myers. He had fallen in love. He had married Amy Tripp. And they were relatively newly married, just over a year together as husband and wife.

 They had big He had purchased a 37-acre farm in Calhoun County just before his 53rd birthday. A piece of land that represented everything he believed in. Something to build on. Something to grow into. He loved that land the way a man loves something he earned through patience and vision. He and Amy had gotten married on that property in the shed that sat near a pond with the South Carolina countryside spreading out around them.

They had written their names in the concrete together as it dried side by side on a small patch of ground near the shed. Their names were still there in the concrete on July 18th, 2004. That day, a Friday, James and Amy had spent at the beach with his sister and his daughter uh celebrating multiple birthdays.

 A good day. The kind of day a family makes memories on. When they returned home that evening, Amy went to their house in Orangeburg. James stopped first at his father’s house to check on him. A daily ritual he had maintained since his mother died. Driving over every morning for coffee and conversation. Keeping his father company in the way that good sons do.

That evening, he and his father sat together and ate boiled peanuts. They talked. James Myers left his father’s house with a big smile on his face. His father would testify to that later. The big smile on his son’s face as he said goodbye. Then James Myers drove to his farm in Calhoun County to check on some baby ducklings he had recently taken in.

 He drove to the shed. He opened the door. Mikael Madi was waiting in the dark with a .22 caliber rifle taken from the shed itself. He ambushed the captain before Myers had any opportunity to react, any chance to draw a weapon, or call for help, or even understand what was happening. Myers was shot nine times.

 Nine shots with his own rifle, from inside his own shed, on his own land. A pathologist who later testified at trial said at least seven of those nine shots would individually have been fatal. But Matityahu did not stop at seven. He did not stop at eight. After James Myers had already fallen to the ground, Matityahu shot him twice more in the head.

 Nine shots, three in the head. On a piece of land where a man’s name was written in the concrete beside the name of his wife. Then Matityahu poured diesel fuel over James Myers’s body and set it on fire. He stole the captain’s badge. And he stole his police weapons. He stole his unmarked police pickup truck, which was stocked with ammunition and body armor.

He drove the truck south toward Florida and kept going. Amy Myers paged her husband that evening when he didn’t come home. She tried his work. No one had been in contact with him. She drove to the farm. She found her husband in the shed where they had been married. She found the love of her life, she would later say in court, lifeless and lying in a pool of blood.

 She started screaming and couldn’t stop. She testified, “I knew that the man I loved was gone immediately, and all of the dreams that we had would never be fulfilled.” Years later, at the time of the execution, she would say, “I have yet to walk that once familiar ground between the pond and the shed without my heart tearing apart.

 I’m missing Jim and thinking about all of our unfulfilled dreams. We didn’t have enough time together. The investigation moved quickly. Investigators connected the abandoned carjack vehicle at the gas station to the crimes in North Carolina. They had a description. They had a direction. Mahdi had driven Myers’ unmarked police truck all the way to Satellite Beach, Florida.

On July 21st, 2004, just 3 days after he killed Captain Myers, just 1 week after the first killing in Virginia, a patrol officer spotted the truck and pulled it over. When the Florida officer discovered what this truck was connected to, what this man was wanted for in South Carolina, he later said he told Mahdi he was grateful Mahdi hadn’t shot at him.

Mahdi’s response was chilling. He told the officer the only reason he hadn’t was because he didn’t think he could successfully shoot two officers and their dog and get away with it. That was his calculation. Not that he didn’t want to, just that the math hadn’t worked in his favor. After his arrest, Mahdi wrote a letter.

The letter said, “I’m guilty as hell. What I’ve done is irredeemable.” He knew exactly what he had done. He said so in writing. Mahdi was extradited to South Carolina to face charges for the murder of Captain James Myers. Two years passed as the legal machinery prepared for trial. In 2006, as jury selection had just begun, Mahdi made a decision that surprised the courtroom.

 He pleaded guilty. No jury would weigh the evidence. The entire weight of what happened next fell on a single man, Judge Clifton Newman. Judge Newman was not a hanging judge. By his own account in later years, he described himself as someone who personally opposed capital punishment. He was not eager to send a young man to his death. He took his time.

 He thought carefully. He reviewed everything. The childhood, the abandonment, the fractured development, the crimes, the letter Mahdi wrote himself. He sat with the totality of it, and then he addressed Mahdi directly from the bench. He said, “My challenge and my commitment throughout my judicial career has been to temper justice with mercy, and to seek to find the humanity in every defendant that I sentence.

” That sense of humanity seems not to exist in Mecaldin Mahdi. He sentenced Mahdi to death. At 23 years old, Mecaldin Mahdi became the youngest person on death row in South Carolina. And the case was not finished with the courtrooms of South Carolina. In 2011, Mahdi was extradited to North Carolina to face charges for the murder of Christopher Boggs, the convenience store clerk shot twice in the head in Winston-Salem on July 15th.

Once again, Mahdi pleaded guilty. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole. Two guilty pleas, two trials, one death sentence, one life sentence. And the first murder, the one in Virginia during the drug deal, was never formally charged at all. On death row, Mahdi did not go quietly. He had smuggled a handmade handcuff key into the courthouse during his South Carolina trial, hidden in his mouth.

 He was caught before he could use it. In 2009, he and another inmate named Quincy Allen attacked a detention officer named Nathan Sasser. They stabbed him. Sasser survived, hised but years later spoke publicly about the permanent damage that attack had done to his life, his ability to work, to be in social situations, to experience ordinary moments without fear.

The kind of damage that doesn’t show up in a medical report, but defines every day afterward. Mahdi’s prison record documented three attempted escapes following his 2006 sentencing and numerous additional infractions across the years. But his attorneys told a different story about who he had become in the final years before his execution.

They said he had become an avid reader with a deep interest in history. That he was engaged with ideas, with the world, with the reality of what he had done and what it had cost. His fifth-grade teacher, Carol Wilson, submitted a statement on his behalf. She wrote, “I know there’s good in him. I saw it when he was a boy.

If Mahdi is allowed to live, I truly believe he can and will become a better person.” His family described him as quiet, affectionate, thoughtful, and creative. His legal team was explicit. “We are not trying to minimize what Mahdi did. We know his crimes were terrible. We are not excusing them. But Mahdi is a fundamentally different person today than the 21-year-old who committed these crimes.

” The courts are not persuaded. As the execution approached, Mahdi’s attorneys made a final legal push on two grounds. First, that his original sentencing hearing had lasted less than 30 minutes. His lawyers argued it didn’t even span the length of a Law & Order episode and was just as superficial. They said the hearing had been constitutionally inadequate.

That Judge Newman had heard virtually nothing about Mahdi’s traumatic childhood, about the documented abuse and abandonment, about the months he had spent in juvenile solitary confinement, and what that isolation had done to his still developing brain. They argued that mitigating evidence of this magnitude never properly presented to the sentencing court should require a new hearing at minimum.

Several defense lawyer organizations filed supporting briefs agreeing that no person should be executed after such a shallow presentation of their life history. Second, the question of who Mahdi had become. His attorneys argued that executing a man who was demonstrably transformed from the person who committed the crime served no legitimate purpose.

That the juvenile isolation, the trauma, more than the neurological impact of years in solitary as a developing adolescent, none of it had ever been placed before a court in a meaningful way. The South Carolina Supreme Court rejected the appeals. On the morning of April 11th, 2025, the United States Supreme Court declined to halt the execution.

 Governor Henry McMaster declined to grant clemency. No South Carolina governor in history had ever granted clemency to a death row inmate. 47 executions, zero clemencies. That record held. In the hours before his execution, Mahdi made his final choices as a living man. He had been given three options for how to die: lethal injection, the electric chair, or the firing squad.

South Carolina had struggled for years to obtain the drugs required for lethal injection or and autopsies of previously executed inmates had revealed disturbing findings. In some cases, the process had taken over 10 minutes with prisoners’ lungs filling with fluid in what doctors compared to the sensation of drowning.

The electric chair carried its own grim history of malfunction and horror. Mahdi chose the firing squad. His attorney, David Weiss, explained the decision. Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Mikal Mahdi has chosen the lesser of three evils. Mikal chose the firing squad instead of being burned and mutilated in the electric chair or suffering a lingering death on the lethal injection gurney.

For his last meal, Mahdi requested ribeye steak cooked medium, mushroom risotto, broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake, and sweet tea. In his final days, there was one request Mahdi made that received almost no coverage. He asked to donate his organs and tissue after death, in his own words, hoping to save others.

The prison system denied the request. His attorney said, “Facing death, Mikal advocated for life.” April 11th, 2025, Broad River Correctional Institution, Columbia, South Carolina. Nine witnesses sat behind bulletproof glass in the observation room. Among them, an unnamed member of Captain James Myers’ family attending to witness the end of a 21-year wait.

The Calhoun County Sheriff, who had been in his first term of office the night James Myers was killed on that farm, the same sheriff who had described Mahdi simply as evil and said he planned to be there when it was over. A representative from the solicitor’s office that had prosecuted the case and one of Mahdi’s own lawyers present for his client’s final moments.

Outside the prison gates, approximately 25 protesters had gathered, anti-death penalty advocates, members of the Catholic Diocese of Charleston, law students from Cornell University, people who believed for various reasons that what was about to happen was wrong. Inside, it was quiet. Just before 6:00, the curtain between the observation room and the execution chamber was drawn back.

Mahdi was already seated in a metal chair, 15 ft from a wall with three small rectangular openings. Behind those openings, three correctional officers, volunteers, stood with rifles aimed at a white cloth target pinned directly over Mahdi’s heart. He sat with his arms secured to the chair. He did not look toward the witnesses, not once, not at any point during what followed.

 He never turned his head toward the glass. At 6:01 in the evening, a prison guard placed a black hood over Mahdi’s head. The guard crossed the room and lifted the shade blocking the three openings in the wall. 30 seconds passed. The shooters fired. The white target over Mahdi’s heart was pushed inward by the impact. Witnesses saw very little blood on his black jumpsuit.

 And then, immediately, Mahdi cried out loudly. His arms flexed outward against the restraints. He groaned. 45 seconds later, softer groans. Then, a low moan. For roughly 80 seconds, his chest continued to rise and fall, rise and fall, while the witnesses on the other side of the glass sat in silence, watching a man who was supposed to be dead keep breathing.

Then one final gasp, then stillness. A doctor stepped forward, checked him for just over a minute, and at 6:05 in the evening, Esme Khalid Dean Mahdi was pronounced dead. He had given no final statement, no last words. He arrived in silence, and he left in silence. Now, here is where the story turns, where it goes from a completed execution into something that cannot be quietly closed.

On May 8th, 2025, less than a month after Mahdi died in that chair, his attorneys filed a document with the South Carolina Supreme Court. It contained the findings of an autopsy, and what that autopsy showed was not what the state had planned. The execution protocol was clear. Three shooters, three bullets, all aimed at the heart.

The expected result, three entry wounds, one destroyed heart, rapid unconsciousness, and a swift death. That is what the South Carolina Supreme Court had ruled would happen when it approved the firing squad method in 2024. Um the justices had written explicitly, an inmate executed via the firing squad is likely to feel pain, perhaps excruciating pain, but that pain will last only 10 to 15 seconds, unless there is a massive botch of the execution in which each member of the firing squad simply misses the inmate’s

heart. The autopsy showed two wounds, not three. And neither wound had struck the heart directly. Instead, the two bullets had entered just above Machetti’s abdomen and shattered on impact, sending metal fragments tearing through his body. They destroyed his liver. They damaged his pancreas.

 They caused internal injuries of enormous severity. But they largely missed his heart. His heart kept beating. And according to a forensic pathologist who reviewed the report, Machetti had almost certainly experienced excruciating uh conscious pain and suffering for somewhere between 30 and 60 seconds after the shot struck him. Remember what the witnesses described, the immediate loud cry when the bullets hit, the repeated groaning, the continued chest movement for 80 seconds.

Remember that the South Carolina Supreme Court had said the pain would last 10 to 15 seconds, that anything beyond that would constitute a massive botch. 80 seconds of witnessed breathing. 30 to 60 seconds of what a pathologist called excruciating conscious pain. That is not 10 to 15 seconds. That is not a clean execution.

The state pushed back. South Carolina’s Department of Corrections maintained that three bullets had in fact struck Machetti. And that two of them had simply passed through the same entry wound. That two bullets had traveled through precisely the same small hole. The state said the execution had proceeded correctly.

 Independent pathologists commissioned by Machetti’s attorneys expressed serious doubt about that explanation. The two wounds on Machetti’s body were described in the autopsy as being almost exactly the same size as each other. The pathologist who reviewed the findings said, “The odds of two separate bullets passing through precisely the same small hole are pretty minuscule.

Mahdi’s attorneys put it more directly in their court filing. They wrote, “A massive botch is exactly what happened to Mikael Mahdi. Three shooters fired. Two wounds appeared. Neither hit the heart. And the man they were supposed to kill quickly and cleanly spent the final minute of his life in what every witness and every pathologist finding suggests was conscious, severe, and unintended agony.

” And here is the layer that makes accountability nearly impossible. A shield law passed in South Carolina in 2023 means the identities of everyone involved in the execution, the three shooters, the training protocols, the qualifications, the positioning, the specifics of how the team was assembled and prepared, is entirely protected from public disclosure.

 Did one shooter fail to fire? Did a rifle malfunction? Did someone flinch or aim incorrectly or panic in the moment? Nobody outside the wall knows. Nobody outside the wall is legally permitted to know. The answers, if they exist anywhere, are sealed behind a secrecy law that the state passed specifically to protect the execution process from scrutiny.

Compare this to the execution that happened 5 weeks earlier on March 7th, 2025. Brad Sigmon was the first person executed by South Carolina’s firing squad in the modern era. His autopsy told a completely different story. Three clear, distinct wounds. A heart described by the pathologist as completely fragmented.

A death that was, by comparison, swift, targeted, and consistent with everything the protocol promised. The same state, the same facility, the same method. Five weeks apart. One worked exactly as designed. One, by every available measure, did not. Mahdi’s attorney, David Weiss, said after the autopsy findings were filed, “They largely missed our client’s heart.

I hope we can figure out a way to ensure this doesn’t happen to anybody else.” His other attorney, speaking about Mahdi’s choice to authorize the release of his autopsy to the public, said, “He wanted this information out there, so it might protect someone else from what happened to him.” Mikal Mahdi killed three people across four states in the summer of 2004.

He confessed. He said himself that what he had done was irredeemable. The judge who sentenced him said he could find no humanity in the man before him. And Captain James Myers, who drove to his farm that evening with a big smile on his face after eating boiled peanuts with his father, never came home to the woman whose name he had written beside his in the concrete by the pond.

His daughter, Meredith Barnett, said ahead of the execution, “Envisioning my daddy being ambushed in a place that he felt safe, being shot nine times, and being set on fire are images I will never comprehend.” She said she had forgiven her father’s killer, not for Mahdi’s sake, but for her own, because she did not want to carry the weight of that hatred into the rest of her life.

She said she looked forward to a future where she no longer had to revisit the circumstances of his death and could just remember the man. Two people. James Myers and Mikal Mahdi. One of them is buried. One of them was executed. And neither of their deaths were what anyone would describe as clean. Here is the question I want to leave in the comments with you.

When the state decides to execute someone, it is making a claim, not just that this person deserves to die, but that the state can carry it out correctly and humanely. When an autopsy later reveals that the shooters missed the heart, that the condemned man almost certainly suffered conscious agony for a minute before dying, does that change anything for you? Does it matter how the execution is carried out if we’ve already decided the person deserves to die? And is the state’s refusal to reveal any details about what went wrong, hiding

behind a shield law, refusing to explain why there were two wounds instead of three? Does that silence represent accountability or the absence of it? Drop your honest answer below. And if you want more cases like this one, where cases where the story does not end at the execution, subscribe to True Crime Matter.

These stories don’t always stop when the curtain closes. This one certainly didn’t.