Mikal Mahdi executed by firing squad in South Carolina for off-duty officer’s brutal murder

A firing squad in South Carolina on Friday executed a death row inmate who ambushed an off-duty police officer, shot him nine times and set him on fire in 2004.

Under the state’s execution protocols, the firing squad put a hood over 42-year-old Mikal Mahdi’s head and shot him in the heart simultaneously with three bullets. His attorney, who witnessed the execution, called it “barbaric” and said it was “a horrifying act that belongs in the darkest chapters of history, not in a civilized society.”

Mahdi’s execution marked South Carolina’s second this year using a firing squad, though it’s just the fifth in the U.S. since 1977. South Carolina carried out the firing squad execution execution of Brad Keith Sigmon last month in what was the first execution to use the method in the country in 15 years.

Mahdi was convicted of the 2004 killing of 56-year-old Capt. James Myers, an off-duty Orangeburg Public Safety officer who was killed at the same spot on his farm property where he and his wife got married. She was the one to find his body.

“His heart and mind are full of hate and malice,” prosecutor David Pascoe told jurors during Mahdi’s trial, according to an archived story in The Times and Democrat. “(He’s) the epitome of evil.”

Mahdi’s attorneys had been arguing that he should be spared because he never got the mental health care he “desperately needed” as a child who repeatedly threatened suicide and endured “extraordinary abuse and trauma.”

Here’s what you need to know about the execution.

How was Mikal Mahdi executed?

Under execution protocols, Mahdi sat restrained in a metal chair, a hood over his head, in the corner of a room shared by the state’s electric chair, witnesses to the execution reported.

He delivered no last words.

The firing squad team − three voluntary corrections staff − stood behind a wall with loaded rifles 15 feet from Mahdi. The wall has an opening for the weapons.

The corrections officers each fired a bullet at a target over his heart.

An Associated Press reporter who witnessed the execution said that Mahdi cried out as the shots hit him and then groaned twice about 45 seconds after that. Mahdi continued to breath for about 80 more seconds “before he appeared to take one final gasp,” AP reported, adding that Mahdi died less than four minutes after the shots rang out.

Capt. James Myers: Slain officer, new wife had big dreams on land where he was killed

How common is the firing squad method?

Five states − South Carolina, Mississippi, Utah, Oklahoma and Idaho  − have legalized firing squads as an execution method, most recently Idaho in 2023. A new bill proposed in Florida could pave the way for firing squad executions in that state, as well.

On March 7, South Carolina executed Brad Keith Sigmon by firing squad, the first execution in the U.S. using the method since 2010 and only the fourth since 1977. The previous three were all carried out in Utah.

Among the witnesses to Sigmon’s execution was his attorney, Gerald “Bo” King.

“Brad’s death was horrifying and violent,” King said in a statement at the time. “It is unfathomable that, in 2025, South Carolina would execute one of its citizens in this bloody spectacle.”

David Weiss, Mahdi’s attorney, said his client chose the firing squad for Friday’s execution because it was “the lesser of three evils,” saying he risked being “burned and mutilated” in an electric chair or “suffering a lingering death” by lethal injection.

South Carolina has defended the constitutionality of all its execution methods. The state’s Attorney General’s Office does not comment on pending litigation.

Stories of justice and action across the country: Sign up for USA TODAY’s This is America newsletter.

Why was Mikal Mahdi executed?

On July 14, 2004, Mahdi − then just 21 years old − began a crime spree that spanned four states and included two murders.

Mahdi stole a neighbor’s gun and station wagon in his home state of Virginia and headed to North Carolina, where he fatally shot gas station clerk Christopher Jason Boggs. Mahdi then went to South Carolina, carjacked a man in downtown Columbia and drove 35 minutes away to a Calhoun County gas station, where he spent at least 45 minutes struggling to get gas with a rejected credit card.

A store clerk called police, prompting Mahdi to flee and ditch the car. Shortly after, Mahdi arrived at Myers’ farm. Mahdi broke into Myers’ shed, where he found guns and laid in wait for the 56-year-old, who had been at the beach that day celebrating the birthdays of his wife, sister and daughter, court records say.

When Myers arrived at the shed, Mahdi attacked, shooting him nine times, pouring diesel fuel on his body and setting him on fire before stealing his police truck and multiple guns, court records say.

“I found the love of my life, my soulmate, the partner that my life revolved around, lifeless, lying in a pool of blood and his body burned by someone who didn’t even know him,” Myers’ wife, Amy Tripp Myers, testified through tears. “As I screamed those blood-curdling screams of pain and anguish, I instantly knew that the man with whom I had just spent the last six years of my life dreaming of a beautiful future was gone like a vapor.”

In a letter written by Mahdi and shared by his attorneys, the inmate wrote: “I’m guilty as hell … What I’ve done is irredeemable.”

Who was Capt. James Myers?

Born in the South Carolina city of Orangeburg, just southwest of Columbia, Myers began his career with the city’s fire department in 1974 before he eventually became a police captain for the Orangeburg Public Safety Department, according to his obituary.

As “an avid outdoorsman,” the obituary continued, Myers loved fishing, hunting, scuba diving.

As a treat for his 53rd birthday, Myers decided to buy a piece of farmland that he worked hard to make his own. In 2002, the day after Valentine’s Day, Myers and Amy Tripp Myers were celebrating their new, elaborate shed on the property.

“Jim and I looked at the newly raised walls of our shed, hugged each other and, like giddy children full of hope, scratched our names in the freshly poured concrete, just a few feet from the spot where Jim took his last breath,” she testified at his trial, according to The Times and Democrat. “I died that night and haven’t been the same person since.”

Who was Mikal Mahdi?

As a child, Mahdi’s attorneys said he suffered years of physical and emotional abuse and was suicidal by the age of 8. By 9, he was diagnosed with major depressive disorder, and when teachers tried to get him specialized help, his father pulled Mahdi out of the school system and “subjected him to several years of paranoid, survivalist ‘home schooling,'” they wrote in court records.

When he was 14, Mahdi first entered the juvenile justice system after being convicted of theft, and from then on, “spent most of the rest of his childhood in custody, often kept isolated and alone,” they said.

Between the ages of 14 and 17, he spent more than 75 days in solitary confinement, and spent about eight more months in solitary by the time he was 21, as well as being on suicide watch, his attorneys said.

“Mikal desperately needed mental health care,” his attorneys said in a news release. “Instead, he languished in juvenile prison, where he spent thousands of hours in solitary confinement. We now know that punitive isolation is deeply damaging to children.”

Mahdi’s attorneys argued to the South Carolina Supreme Court that the judge who sentenced him to death knew almost nothing about Mahdi’s troubled past, information that could have resulted in a lighter sentence.

They have also criticized what they say was a weak defense at trial, arguing that Mahdi’s attorneys at the time spent less than 30 minutes arguing against the death penalty. It “didn’t even span the length of a ‘Law & Order’ episode and was just as superficial,” they said.

When is the next execution in the U.S.?

Mahdi’s execution was the 12th inmate in the U.S. this year and the third in South Carolina. Another inmate was executed in the U.S. this week: Michael Tanzi in Florida on Tuesday.

Another two executions, both by lethal injection, are scheduled this month: Moises Sandoval Mendoza in Texas on April 23 and James Osgood in Alabama on April 24.

So far, 25 inmates are set to be executed in the U.S. in 2025, but that number is likely to go up as states continue to approve more death warrants. Last year, 25 inmates were executed in the U.S.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Mikal Mahdi executed by firing squad in South Carolina