Stand Your Ground on Camp Swamp Road: The Scott Spivey Shooting - podcast episode cover

Stand Your Ground on Camp Swamp Road: The Scott Spivey Shooting

Feb 25, 202633 minSeason 5Ep. 2
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Summary

This episode delves into the 2023 shooting of Scott Spivey, initially ruled self-defense following a road-rage incident and nine-mile chase. Spivey's sister, Jennifer Foley, tirelessly investigates, uncovering a trove of evidence including recorded phone calls and bodycam footage that expose significant police misconduct, conflicts of interest, and a manipulated narrative. Her civil lawsuit forces the release of crucial files, leading to public outcry, terminated officers, and ultimately, a judge rejecting the shooter's Stand Your Ground claim, raising questions about justice and gun laws.

Episode description

On September 9, 2023, a road-rage encounter in South Carolina turns into a nine-mile chase and ends with 33-year-old Scott Spivey dead on a rural back road. Police quickly call it self-defense under Stand Your Ground.


But Scott’s sister, Jennifer Foley, doesn’t buy it. As the case is closed and sealed off, she starts building her own timeline, until a civil lawsuit forces the release of the evidence file: thousands of documents, photos, body-cam and dash-cam footage, and recorded phone calls that suggest the official story was shaped from the start.


Wall Street Journal reporter Valerie Bauerlein and attorney Mark Tinsley follow the trail into a world of conflicts of interest, missing (or buried) evidence, and a system that treats the shooter as the victim.


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Transcript

Intro / Opening

Business analyst, certified financial planner, and the host of the Jill on Money Podcast. With the new year upon us, there's no better time to take control of your financial life and the Jill on is here to help. Questions. Possible for me to provide unconventional and I hope entertaining insights on your money and more importantly on your life. I think we should just say what happened, if you can, just describe what happened that day.

The Road Rage and Fatal Shooting

So um Scott Spivey was a 33-year-old insurance adjuster. He lived in Tabor City, North Carolina, which is just north of the state line. Journalist Valerie Bauerline. He was a young guy, good looking guy, and he drove himself down to North Myrtle Beach, which is about thirty minutes from his house, on a Saturday in September, September ninth, twenty twenty three.

He drove him south down around lunchtime to sit at the bar at a place called Boardwalk Billy's, a very popular place right by the water, and watch, you know, SEC, ACC football afternoon, which he did. Scott Spivey stayed at the bar for a few hours. He ate a cheeseburger, drank a half dozen Miller Lights, and took some shots of fireball whiskey. And finally about five o'clock, some five hours later, he starts his drive home.

At the time, Spivey was living in a converted trailer on his family's land in Tabor City, about thirty-five minutes from the bar in North Myrtle Beach where he'd spent the afternoon. He got into his black Chevy Silverado. And headed west. On Highway 9. But about 10 minutes into the drive, Spivey got into an altercation with another driver. Spivey's version of what happened will never be known, but according to the other driver, a 34-year-old local restaurant owner named Weld.

Weldon Boyd, Spivey swerved just inches from his truck and pointed a gun at his passenger. Spivey then cut in front of Boyd and slammed on the brakes, forcing Boyd to steer his truck onto the median. Boyd was furious. He decided to chase after him down Highway 9. This chase goes on for many miles. And several minutes into it, Weldon Boyd calls 911. And so we have sort of this running transcript of what's happening in real time. And he said, There's a guy out here, he's crazy, he's waving a gun.

You need to send a trooper here. XYZ, but I'm gonna keep after him. And if he points that gun at me again, I will shoot him. Hey, I've got a guy pointing a gun at me driving. Um we're armed as well. He keeps throwing the gun in our faces, acting like he's about to shoot us. If he keeps this up, I'm gonna shoot him. Boyd followed Spivey for roughly nine miles. Witnesses would later describe the two of them weaving in and out of traffic and cutting each other off.

Finally, just shy of the North Carolina border, Spivey exited the highway. Boyd followed him. Scott's Bobby turns in on a road called Camp Swamp Road. It's country crossroads. They've gone from the suburbs of North Myrtle Beach out into a very, very rural area, mostly farmland. And Weldon Boyd turns him after him. All right, so he's turning on to Camp Swamp Road.

This dude shoots at me, we're gonna put him down. I mean this dude's insane. Eventually, Spivey pulled over, got out of his truck, and shouted something at the two men in the truck behind him. He had a gun in his hand. He's stopping. Hey, we're about to have a fucking shootout, dude. This dude got a gun. He's got a fucking gun.

And Weldon Boyd and his passenger, they're both armed. And they shoot through the windshield of their truck about thirty times, roughly thirty times. And Scott Spivey is shot and falls back into his truck. and collapses and dies.

Self-Defense Declared, Questions Emerge

The shooting took place in Orie County, South Carolina, a mostly rural, low-lying county of swamps, rivers, and long back roads just inland from Myrtle Beach. The Orie County police showed up within minutes, alerted by neighbors who'd heard the gunshots and called 911. The cops found Spivey slumped over the console of his truck. Weldon Boyd and his passenger, a friend named Bradley Williams, were standing on the road.

Boyd told one of the officers that Spivey had shot first, and that he and Williams had returned fire in self defense. And the police essentially said, Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I get it. There were a couple of witnesses who had pulled over, who had seen some part of this beef as it took place.

And within minutes they're like, Yep, this seems pretty cut and dry. They say it multiple times in the body and dash cam footage that we have. Um, and I got witnesses here that are backing that up as well, just so you know. The officers took the two men's pistols and spoke with them for a few minutes. On the surface, the confrontation appeared to meet the criteria for South Carolina's Stand Your Ground Law.

Around 9 p.m. that night, about three hours after the shooting, Boyd and Williams were allowed to leave. Scott Spivey, meanwhile, was lying dead in his pickup. Instead of leaving in a coroner's van, his body was sealed inside his truck and then towed to the police department's impound lot.

As it turned out, that was just one of many unusual things that happened that summer evening on Camp Swamp Road. It would take years and the intervention of Spivey's older sister before the truth was finally brought to light. I'm Jed Lipinski. This is Gone South. You may recognize Valerie Bauerline from an episode we did last week. She's a national affairs correspondent for the Wall Street Journal.

And the author of Devil at His Elbow, the definitive account of the fall of the Murdoch family dynasty in Hampton County, South Carolina.

Jennifer Foley Fights for Truth

While Valerie was fact checking that book a few years ago, she spoke with a well known personal injury attorney named Mark Tinsley. Tinsley brought the first civil case that put Alex Murdoch's finances under a microscope, leading to the unraveling of his web of fraud and theft. But he told Valerie about a new case that had just come across his desk. And he said, you know, I just got the strangest call.

It's from a woman in North Carolina, like two hundred miles away from where he lives in the southern part of South Carolina. And he said that he was interested in her case because what she said was that her brother got into a road rage altercation in Ori County, which is where Myrtle Beach is.

And the other driver chased him for nine miles down the highway, turned in after him on his shortcut home, and when her brother got out of the truck, shot and killed him. And he went home that night and was never charged with anything because it was a standard ground case. And Mark Tinsley is an avid hunter. He can't even tell you how many guns he owns. And he said, you know, I just I couldn't understand how you could chase a man nine miles and call it stand your ground.

By the time Valerie spoke to Mark Tinsley, six months had passed since the shooting at Camp Swamp Road. The Ory County Police Department had closed its criminal investigation and ruled the killing self-defense. Local solicitor or district attorney agreed, as did the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, known as

As Tinsley explained, the state's attorney general now had the file, but they'd reviewed it and found nothing new and were moving toward the same conclusion. From the state's point of view, the case was dead in the water. And yet, Scott Spivey's sister had reason to believe the cops were hiding something, that certain evidence had not been reviewed.

She'd contacted Tinsley in the hopes that he would file a civil lawsuit against the shooters. Mark Tinsley had never sued a defendant in a stand-your ground case before, and as far as he knew, neither had any other attorney in South Carolina. For a couple of reasons. One, if you're found to be standing your ground in the criminal context, you're given civil immunity, meaning that there's no wrongful death. There's no ability of a family to even sue you.

But also, Mark Tinsley, as we mentioned, was a personal injury attorney. If you're shot and killed in your car, that is not the fault of your insurer, nine times out of ten. And so the insurers immediately get released from those claims, which means there's no money. There's no kind of big policy that would cover it. And if there's no possibility that any money will be recovered, personal injury lawyers just don't get involved.

But Mark Tinsley did. He has made many millions of dollars over the years in his practice, and he took the case because he wanted to. Valerie was intrigued. She'd written about standard ground cases before. She saw this case as a chance to write about the law's complicated legacy. We've had self-defense laws in this country from the beginning. They came with English common law from the 1600s, this whole idea of the castle doctrine, right? A man's home is their castle.

So a person would have the right to defend themselves with lethal force, with no duty to retreat in their home. That was the foundation of self defense law in this country. And in the early two thousands, the NRA, in particular in Florida, was pushing a more specific law, making self-defense laws even more broad. And so in two thousand five.

Florida passed the first modern self-defense law called Stand Your Ground. And it enabled you to defend yourself with no duty to retreat, not just in your home, but in any place you had a right to be, and primarily your vehicle. And immediately there was a wave of very similar laws in 2006 in several red states, including South Carolina. We're at a point now where there are twenty-eight states roughly that have some type of standard ground law, and it's very broad.

Flawed Investigation and Local Connections

A few days after her call with Mark Tinsley, Valerie called Scott Spivey's sister. Her name was Jennifer Foley, and she was a high school biology teacher in Tabor City, a 10-minute drive from where the shooting took place. The night of her brother's death, Jennifer was giving her two toddlers a bath when she got a call from her brother's best friend. He told her something had happened to Scott and that she needed to get to Camp Swamp Road right away.

And so she and her husband bundle up the babies, take'em to her mother in law and beep feed as fast as they can to Camp Swamp Road. But by the time they get there, it's nine twenty five, so three and a half hours after the shooting. Scott Spivey's truck has just been towed from the scene. The officers that are there are like, ma'am, we can't tell you anything. There's nothing we can tell you. You know, you'll get expect a call from the coroner. And that's pretty much it.

She was treated the way that families commonly are in this scenario, which is that they don't have the rights to any information, including a courtesy phone call that their loved one has been killed. She even says, where is he? Is he at the hospital? Is he at the morgue? And they won't tell her. Under South Carolina's Stand Your Ground Law, the person who claims self-defense is legally considered the victim, while the person they shot is treated as the perpetrator.

As a result, the deceased person's family is not afforded the same victims' rights that they'd have in a typical homicide case. After leaving the scene that night, Jennifer couldn't sleep. She spent hours refreshing the county jail's booking page, waiting to see if anyone had been arrested for her brother's killing. But no one had.

And by the next morning she hasn't slept. She's like, Something is wrong here. My brother is killed. He has no criminal record, no record of violence, and nobody's been charged with anything. It wasn't until the next afternoon that Jennifer finally got a call from an Ory County detective. He told her that Scott had been, quote, road raging, that he'd pulled over on Camp Swamp Road, pointed a gun at the other men, and fired first. The shooters, he said, acted in self defense.

According to Jennifer, the detective spoke as if these were established facts. Jennifer wasn't a cop, but she wasn't naive either. She'd minored in criminal justice in college, and even interned at the North Carolina State Crime Lab in Raleigh. From her perspective, the police had reached their conclusion way too quickly, especially in a case involving multiple vehicles, 911 calls, and a nine-mile chase. And from the beginning she starts raising questions like what's going on here?

It's a small town, and some of Weldon Boyd's texts that he's sending to people about what happened are getting forwarded to her. She's getting screenshots. She's getting forwarded photos that Weldon Boyd took of the beef on the road. She hears that he took pictures of her brother's dead body. So she starts building her own chronology, her own contemporaneous notes, organizing all of these tidbits that she gets very early on.

And it's a fortuitous decision because over time it becomes clear that the police have zero interest in investigating what really happened that night, good, bad, or indifferent. New Maybelline. With a hyaluronic acid and oil. Serum lipstick.

I'm Sarah Turney. And I'm Courtney Nicole. We're the hosts of the Crime House Original podcast, The Final Hours. Crime has impacted both of our families, teaching us how the last conversations, the misbred flags, can change everything. On the final hours we examine the moments before a disappearance. the questions that never got answered. A podcast that puts the moments before a disappearance under a microscope. Listen to and follow the final hours available now wherever you get your podcasts.

Ving firar 70 år av resor som är svåra att släppa taget om, och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstå. Boka redan nu på wing.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först. Semester. vill hem från. In the days after her brother Scott Spivey's death, Jennifer Foley launched her own investigation into what happened. And what she found only deepened her suspicion that the Ory County Police Department had mishandled the case.

Jennifer called the Ory County detective back and asked if they'd checked her brother's phone yet. The detective seemed to suggest that they hadn't. She then mentioned something else. In the days after the shooting, Weldon Boyd had been texting people photos from the scene. That suggested the shooter's phones hadn't been seized as evidence. The detective told her they were still processing the case and that someone would get back to her in a few weeks.

Jennifer spotted another red flag in the way the coroner handled her brother's body. The coroner made significant decisions that are outside official policy. There are important forms around the handling of a body that were just incomplete or not filled out at all. You know, Scott Spivey dies at five fifty eight. His body's not taken out of his truck until one AM. There's no record of when he went into refrigeration.

Which means that it's impossible to take a blood alcohol sample that would tell you, was he drunk? If he was drunk, how drunk was he? There are just things that you can't know. Orie County's chief deputy coroner said only that Spivey had died from gunshot wounds and ruled his death a homicide. But the county doesn't have its own forensic autopsy facility, so Spivey's autopsy didn't take place until four days later.

It was performed by a pathologist at the Medical University of South Carolina, in Charleston. And it's that pathologist who does the autopsy who writes clear as day, cause of death, gunshot wound to the back. The autopsy report noted that the fatal hollow point bullet entered under Spivey's right arm and traveled through his chest. Again, this information stood in contrast to Spivey as the aggressor, charging at the two men with a gun.

Finally, Jennifer saw a blatant conflict of interest at the heart of the investigation. As a lifelong resident of the area, she knew that the shooter Weldon Boyd was friendly with members of the police department. Weldon Boyd was very well known by all the police officers that were on the scene, as far as I can tell.

Police officers ate free at his restaurant in uniform, and their family ate half price. He cooked for the department frequently. He went hunting with those guys. He had an honorary SWAT team badge that he was given by Brandon Strickland. Brandon Strickland was the deputy chief of Ory County. He was in charge of criminal investigations. Jennifer knew that he and Boyd were buddies.

To Jennifer, all of this suggested that the case had been compromised from the start. She felt she needed some outside oversight. Through friends and family, she connected with the Orie County Commission, which oversees the police department. So she had their ear within a a week or two of the shooting, and they ask for some state oversight of the case.

There's a long investigation that lasts from like September to January before the Attorney General gets the case file from the Ory County Police and as well as the state investigators. And takes, you know, some time to review it, but decides You know, this was clearly a case of stand your ground on the part of Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams. There's no evidence that any charges are warranted, and they closed the case in April of twenty twenty four.

Civil Lawsuit Unearths Hidden Evidence

The State Attorney General's decision to close the Scott Spivey case was devastating for Jennifer and her family. By then, though, Jennifer was in touch with attorney Mark Tinsley, and two months after the AG's decision, Tinsley filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the two shooters. What happens there is really fascinating.

Because Scott was not a victim, he was the perpetrator, she didn't qualify for victim's rights, like having access to the police file or an ombudsman to keep her informed about what was going on, which would be typical in a violent crime for the family members of somebody that was involved in violent crime. But what happens in the civil case is that civil discovery is quite broad. It can be.

And all of a sudden she went from an absence of information to the Ory County Police Department turning over thousands and thousands of pages of files in civil discovery. And in fact, it was so much information. It was 30,000 items, 70 gig. It was so much information that her lawyers are working many other cases. They just didn't have the time to go through it.

The files were a potential treasure trove of information. They included 911 calls, body and dash cam videos, emails, internal reports, hundreds of photos. The problem was that they were completely disorganized. Data dumps of this kind are designed to overwhelm. It would take hundreds of hours to go through it all line by line, and Tinsley's office was both small and overstretched with other cases. So, for the next six months, the files just sat at Tinsley's office, unexplored.

So the lawsuit is filed in June of twenty twenty four. It's this voluminous amount of discovery. It kind of sits there, you know, in that fall and into the winter. until there's some key depositions coming up in the case. And that would be of Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams. And Jennifer Foley realizes these are coming up and and she says, Well can I take a look at the evidence?

So she drives herself down to the law office, picks up a thumb drive with all of this information. It takes a day to download it on her computer. And in Super Bowl weekend of twenty twenty five, in February twenty twenty five. She sends her husband and the babies to watch the game at her mother-in-law's house. Stays home and ends up pulling an all nighter, listening to all of this information, going through all these photos. that we found would change everything.

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Damning Recordings Expose Collusion

Jennifer Foley learned many things from the Ory County case file and her brother's death. One of them was that around the time of the shooting, Weldon Boyd was having a hard time. Police reports indicated that Boyd had recently broken up with his fiancee. On the day of the shooting, she had returned the new Toyota 4 runner he bought her and left her five karat engagement ring in the cup holder.

She was seven months pregnant, and the two of them were in a messy custody dispute over their unborn child. To gather evidence that might help his custody case, Boyd had installed an app on his phone that recorded all of his incoming calls. To Jennifer's amazement, the app contained recordings of dozens of calls that Boyd had placed in the hours and days after he shot her brother.

So he's recording all these calls, including the minutes after the shooting, when he calls the deputy chief of the Ory County Police, one of his best friends, and says, Hey man, I need you to come out here. I had to shoot somebody. What's up, man? Brandon, where are you at? I'm at my house. Can you come to Camp Swamp Road off of nine like as fast as possible? Yeah, what's wrong? I had to shoot somebody. What? He held a gun at us, he ran us off the road, we stopped between

to try and get the stuff on the trailer because we were hauling a couch. He got out, pulled a gun, started shooting at us, and we had to shoot back. And a few minutes later you hear the deputy chief saying, I got the right ones coming. We're gonna take care of this. Don't worry. The calls reveal something else, too. As Boyd waited on the roadside, the deputy chief was already helping shape the official story.

He contacted the local prosecutor within minutes, framing the shooting as self-defense, before detectives had interviewed witnesses, collected phones, or even removed Scott's body from his truck. At one point, Boyd expressed surprise that the cops had towed Scott Spivey's body away instead of waiting for the coroner to get there.

Weldon Boyd says to his friend, the deputy chief, I thought it was weird they towed him in the truck, and he said, Oh no, man, I did that for you, to help you if the family ever came after you. You know, if you want things done a certain way, you can do that. The recordings also include calls with Boyd's best friend, Bradley Williams, who was in the passenger seat of his truck that day, and also fired shots at Scott Spivey.

He's on the phone with Bradley Williams, they have a long call a couple of nights after the shooting, and Boyd he pauses and he says Bradley, I know. But I'm a person. You know, it is what it is. I had a good time. And they laugh about it. And then they talk about getting teardrop tattoos to commemorate the killing.

Jennifer Foley couldn't believe what she'd heard in the Ory County's case file, or the fact that no one else, including the state police and the attorney general's office, seemed to have heard it. Mark Tinsley was due to depose Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams at seven AM the next morning. Hours before the deposition took place, Jennifer began forwarding Tinsley recordings from Boyd's phone. Tinsley wound up using some of them to build his questions.

By this point, Jennifer had been talking with Valerie about her brother's case for close to a year. So, days after discovering the call recordings, she sent them to Valerie. And it was, you know, you need to hear these calls. And so I started working we started working through them together and comparing what we were hearing and and piecing together what was actually happening behind the scenes.

And it was actually like Roshimon, right? Like you think what the police are telling you in the official version on September ninth is completely upside down from what actually was happening. And Jennifer has said often, you know, you're hearing people's innermost thoughts when they think no one's listening.

I can remember, you know, you hear Weldon Boyd and Brandon Strickland, the deputy chief, and the deputy chief says, you know, I'm glad it was a white male. If he'd been black, that would have been a whole different story. And you're like, is this happening? Mark Tinsley was equally appalled by the recordings. He sent them to the county attorney and told him, please listen to these.

And the county attorney was new in the job. He listens to the calls and calls Mark Tinsley back and said, How in the fuck weren't these guys charged?

Body Cam Footage Reveals Malfeasance

Of course, the Orie County evidence file contained a lot more than call recordings from Weldon Boyd's phone. As Jennifer discovered, they also contained around 20 hours of body and dash cam footage. Jennifer and Valerie spent days poring over it. What they found exposed a deeper level of police malfeasance than either of them had thought possible. For example, the first officer on the scene, a guy named Kerry Higgs, arrives 12 minutes after the shooting.

On Higgs' body cam, you can hear Weldon Boyd say, he shot us first, before waving at a few nearby drivers and saying, they saw everything. But instead of actually interviewing those witnesses, Officer Higgs takes Boyd's word for it. He radios in that multiple witnesses saw the victim jump out of his truck and brandish a gun. Once the cops finally do talk to witnesses, they seem to willfully misinterpret what they say.

You'll hear an officer tell his superior, Oh, they were firing weapons way, you know, five miles down the road and saying there are five witnesses that bolster Weldon Boyd's story, when in fact that's not true and there's not a single soul, living soul. that saw the shooting itself except for Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams.

When the paramedics arrive, they check on Spivey's body in his truck. They discover that one of the bullets had entered through his back, a finding that a pathologist in Charleston would later cite as the cause of death. The paramedics then pass this information to Officer Higgs. And one of the paramedics said, Hey, he was shot in the back. If he's shot in the back, isn't the other guy at fault? Question. So if he shot him in the back on this way, is he appalled now or no?

And the officer says, Oh no, no. Clearly he was twisting around like some sort of, you know, something out of the movie. He he contorting himself and you can see the officer acted out. Certain moments caught on the body cameras are almost comical, like something out of the movie Super Trooper. After a sergeant arrives on the scene, you can see him talking to Boyd and Boyd's attorney. He then scribbles something on a notepad off camera before walking over to Boyd and showing it to him.

He's holding the notepad out of visibility, out of range of the body cam, but he flips the page and if you slow it down, you can see that's what's written there. And it says act like a victim camera. Act like a victim. Camera. The officer seemed to be advising Boyd on how to behave. Given that the scene is being recorded on body cameras. Then, close to an hour after the cops arrive, their body cameras all abruptly shut off. They remain shut off for the next two hours.

even though state policy requires that body cameras remain on until an officer leaves the scene. According to police reports, a tow truck took Scott Spivey's black Silverado, with his body still inside, to the police impound lot at 911 p.m. Two minutes later, the officer's body cameras suddenly flicker back to light. And the normal sequence of events would be that medics arrive, the coroner arrives, and the coroner takes the body to the morgue, correct?

Correct. That's what the policies require with the police department. They are that's what state statute requires. A body must be in possession of the coroner or their deputy. That didn't happen here. The coroner shows up at the scene and leaves, strangely. They call for a coroner's ban and it's never used. So there were many irregularities that were happening quickly.

It's important to remember that by the time Jennifer and Valerie watched this disturbing footage, the case file had already been in the possession of both SLED and the state attorney general's office. And that the AG's office had officially closed the case months earlier, saying there was quote insufficient evidence to charge Boyd or Williams. And yet, it appeared to Jennifer and Valerie that neither of those agencies had actually seen this footage before.

Justice, Laws, and Lasting Impact

In March of 2025, Jennifer and her attorney Mark Tinsley began sharing the body and dash cam footage with local media. A month later, Valerie published two big pieces in the Wall Street Journal, which took the story national. The reports created an outcry in Ory County. In response, the police chief held a press conference in which he admitted that some of the dash cam clips from the scene had been improperly mislabeled in the system and buried so deep that investigators never saw them.

So if I call my body camera domestic violence instead of shooting, it doesn't pop up the same way. So there were efforts made by other officers to conceal footage that they had of that night as well. One guy called it robbery. Robbery, you know. The police chief noted that several officers had been terminated, including Officer Higgs and Weldon Boyd's friend, the Deputy Chief.

But even after viewing the footage Jennifer unearthed, Sled and the Attorney General's office still declined to press charges against Boyd and Williams. Yes, they seem to say. The Orie County cops had broken the law and they deserve to be investigated further. But that doesn't change the fact that Boyd and Williams were innocent under the state's stand your ground law.

And the attorney general determined from the beginning that this was a clear-cut case of self-defense. And he continued to maintain that posture. Because of this simple argument, if Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams stay in their truck where they have a right to be, and Scott Spivey gets out of his truck with a gun, that's the salient fact. The others are just kind of noise.

On September 9, 2025, two years to the day after Scott Spivey was killed, Congresswoman Nancy Mace publicly blasted the state attorney general for his handling of the case and his decision not to prosecute the shooter. And there are tape recordings about the guy that shot him bragging about how terrified Scott Spivey was before he died. We've seen video. We've seen body cam where it was written handwritten on a note that said, act like a victim. A note that was snuck to the shooter.

A month later, the Attorney General's office announced that it was appointing a special prosecutor to reopen the case and determine if charges should be brought for the killing or the mishandling of evidence. Then, just before this episode aired, something happened that almost nobody expected. A South Carolina judge rejected Weldon Boyd's stand your ground claim in the Spivey family's civil suit.

That means Jennifer Spivey's wrongful death case can now move forward and could end up before a jury. According to Valerie, it also means that Weldon Boyd is much more likely to face either murder or manslaughter charges in the death of Scott Spivey. Still, for Valerie, the larger takeaway is what this story says about the state of America's gun laws.

In March of 2024, South Carolina passed a constitutional carry law. The law allows most adults to carry handguns openly or concealed without a permit in most public places. Around the same time, a major study using federal data found that standard ground laws are associated with significantly higher homicide rates, with some southern states seeing increases of 10% or more.

And that number it's higher, but it's also increasing, right? The percentage is increasing. So you have places where, you know, standard ground deaths are twenty percent, fifteen, twenty percent of the homicide rate, which is incredible. Since publishing her stories last year, Valerie has heard from people all over the country. They tell her that something strikingly similar happened to their son, their brother, their father. And they ask the same question.

Would she be willing to tell their story, too? If you have information, story tips, or feedback you'd like to share with the Gone South team, please email us at gone southpodcast at gmail.com. That's gone southpodcast at gmail.com. For bonus content, you can follow us on Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram at Gone South Podcast.

You can also sign up for our newsletter on Substack at Gone South with Jed Lipinski. Gone South is an Odyssey original podcast. It's created, written, and narrated by me, Jed Lipinski. Our executive producers are Leah Reese Dennis, Matty Sprunk Kaiser, and Lloyd Lockridge. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Gone South is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil. Production support from Ian Mont and Sean Cherry. Special thanks to Maura Curran, Josephina Francis.

Kurt Courtney and Hilary Schuff. Thank you for listening to Gone Sound.

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