The execution of Mikal Dean Mahdi by firing squad at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, on the evening of April 11, 2025, ended a 19-year legal journey that began with the brutal 2004 murder of off-duty police Captain James Myers. At precisely 6:01 p. m.
, a black hood was placed over Mahdi’s head, and three volunteer corrections officers, hidden behind a wall, aimed their rifles at a small white target pinned over his heart. Thirty seconds later, the shots rang out, but what followed was not the swift, clinical death the state had promised.
Mahdi, 42, cried out loudly as the bullets struck. His arms flexed. He groaned.
For approximately 80 seconds, witnesses watched in silence as his chest continued to rise and fall, a slow, agonizing decline that did not end until 6:05 p. m. , when a doctor stepped forward and pronounced him dead.
The man who had spent nearly two decades on death row for the calculated ambush and fiery murder of a police captain left this world without a single final word.
But the story did not end with his death. Less than a month later, on May 8, 2025, Mahdi’s attorneys filed a 𝓈𝒽𝓸𝒸𝓀𝒾𝓃𝑔 document with the South Carolina Supreme Court, an autopsy report that raised serious questions about whether the execution had been botched. According to the findings, two bullets, not three, struck Mahdi.
Neither had hit his heart directly. Instead, the shots entered just above his abdomen, shattering into metal splinters, destroying his liver and damaging his pancreas. A forensic pathologist who reviewed the report concluded that Mahdi likely experienced excruciating conscious pain and suffering for 30 to 60 seconds after the shots were fired, contradicting the state’s expectation of near-instant unconsciousness.
The state’s Department of Corrections pushed back, maintaining that three bullets had struck Mahdi, with two passing through the same entry point. But independent pathologists hired by Mahdi’s legal team expressed serious doubt, arguing that the wound configurations and internal injury patterns were inconsistent with two bullets traveling through precisely the same small hole. “A massive botched is exactly what happened to Mikal Mahdi,” his lawyers wrote in their filing, pointing to a previous South Carolina Supreme Court opinion that had stated executions by firing squad would be constitutional unless there was a massive botch in which the firing squad simply missed the inmate’s heart, exactly what happened on April 11th.
This execution was the second time South Carolina had used the firing squad, the first being Brad Sigmon on March 7, 2025, just five weeks earlier. Sigmon’s autopsy told a very different story, three clear wounds, a heart described as completely fragmented, a death that was, by comparison, swift and targeted. The contrast between the two executions has become a focal point for death penalty opponents and legal scholars alike.
If the state is going to deploy the firing squad as a humane alternative to lethal injection or the electric chair, they argue that precision must be guaranteed. The Mahdi autopsy suggests that precision may not always be assured.
Mahdi’s journey to that metal chair began in a fractured childhood. Born on March 20, 1983, in Virginia, he grew up in Lawrenceville, a small town where his father, Sharif, a former Marine who converted to Islam, struggled with a history of alcoholism. When Mahdi was just three years old, his mother left, and his father told him she had died.
By age eight, his father could no longer manage, and Mahdi was sent to live with an uncle and aunt in Baltimore. He dropped out of school in the third grade, yet managed to earn his GED and complete community college coursework by the age of 21, a testament to a resilience that would ultimately be overshadowed by violence.
In 2001, at age 18, Mahdi attacked a police officer in Virginia, receiving a 93-month prison sentence plus 15 years of probation. He was released in May 2004. Two months later, three people were dead.
Between July 14 and July 18, 2004, Mahdi executed a cold, calculated spree. On day one, in Virginia, he allegedly killed a man during a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 deal gone wrong, a murder for which he was never formally tried. He stole a gun and a car and fled.
On day two, July 15, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, he walked into a convenience store and shot 29-year-old clerk Christopher Jason Boggs twice in the head, killing him. On day three, July 17, in Columbia, South Carolina, he carjacked a man at an intersection. He then stopped for gas off Interstate 26 in Calhoun County, where he broke into a shed on the property of Captain James Myers.
Captain Myers, 56, was a 30-year veteran of the Orangeburg Department of Public Safety, a man of quiet leadership who had started as a firefighter in 1974. He had purchased that land just before his 53rd birthday, a place he loved, where he had married his wife less than two years before Mahdi arrived. On July 18, 2004, after a birthday celebration with his wife, sister, and daughter, Captain Myers came home to find Mahdi waiting in the dark.
Mahdi ambushed him, shooting him nine times, including twice in the head after Myers had already fallen to the ground. Then he doused the body in diesel fuel and set it on fire. He took Myers’ unmarked police truck and weapons and drove toward Florida.
When Amy Trip Myers, James Myers’ wife, came home that evening, she found her husband’s body in the shed where they had been married. “I found the love of my life lifeless, lying in a pool of blood,” she would later say in court. The investigation moved quickly.
Mahdi attempted to use a stolen credit card at a gas station near the farm, the same station where he had abandoned the carjacked vehicle. Investigators connected the dots. On July 21, 2004, just four days after the murder, Mahdi was arrested in Florida, still driving the dead officer’s truck.
After his arrest, Mahdi wrote a letter that read, “I’m guilty as hell. What I’ve done is irredeemable.” He knew exactly what he had done.
Extradited to South Carolina to face charges for the murder of Captain James Myers, Mahdi pleaded guilty in 2006, before a jury could be selected. The decision fell to Judge Clifton Newman, a man who, by his own later admission, opposed capital punishment. But faced with the totality of the crimes, the coldness and calculation behind three killings in three states over three days, Judge Newman concluded, “That sense of humanity seems not to exist in Mikal Dean Mahdi.”
He sentenced Mahdi to death.
At 23, Mahdi became the youngest person on death row in South Carolina. In 2011, extradited to North Carolina for the murder of Christopher Boggs, he again pleaded guilty, receiving life without parole. The first murder, in Virginia, was never formally charged.
On death row, Mahdi did not go quietly. He smuggled a handmade key for his handcuffs into the courthouse, hidden in his mouth, before the sentencing. In 2009, he and another inmate attacked a detention officer, Nathan Sasser, stabbing him.
Sasser survived but suffered lasting damage. Mahdi’s prison record listed three attempted escapes and numerous other infractions over the years.
But his attorneys told a different story about who he had become closer to his execution. They described him as an avid reader with a deep interest in history, a fundamentally different person from the 21-year-old who committed those crimes. His fifth-grade teacher, Carol Wilson, submitted a statement: “I know there’s good in him.
I saw it when he was a boy. If Mikal is allowed to live, I truly believe he can and will become a better person.” His legal team was careful not to minimize his crimes, but they argued that the evidence of his traumatic childhood had never been properly presented at his sentencing, where Judge Newman heard less than 30 minutes of testimony about that childhood.
They argued that years of solitary confinement as a juvenile had altered his developing brain.
The courts were not persuaded. On the morning of April 11, 2025, the United States Supreme Court declined to halt the execution. Governor Henry McMaster, who had the power to grant clemency, declined as well.
No South Carolina governor had offered clemency in the 47 executions since the death penalty resumed in 1976. That record held.
In the hours before his execution, Mahdi made his final choices. For his last meal, he requested ribeye steak cooked medium, mushroom risotto, broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake, and sweet tea. He had three execution methods to choose from: lethal injection, the electric chair, or 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.” Mahdi chose the firing squad, citing problems with lethal injection, which had been found to cause prolonged, drowning-like deaths, and the grim history of the electric chair.
On April 11, 2025, at Broad River Correctional Institution, nine witnesses gathered behind bulletproof glass, including an unnamed member of the Myers family, the Calhoun County Sheriff, a representative from the solicitor’s office, and one of Mahdi’s own lawyers. Outside, about 25 protesters from the Catholic Diocese of Charleston and others demanded an end to the death penalty. Inside, at just before 6:00 p.
m. , the curtain was pulled back. Mahdi was seated in a metal chair 15 feet from a wall with three small rectangular openings, behind which the three volunteer shooters were positioned.
He did not look toward the witnesses.
At 6:01 p. m. , a prison guard placed a black hood over Mahdi’s head.
The guard then crossed the room and lifted the shade blocking the openings. Thirty seconds passed. The shooters fired.
The white target, a small cloth marked with a red bull’s-eye pinned directly over Mahdi’s heart, was pushed inward by the impact. Mahdi cried out loudly. His arms flexed outward.
Witnesses saw little blood on his black jumpsuit. He groaned, then again about 45 seconds later, softer groans, then a low moan. For roughly 80 seconds, his chest continued to rise and fall.
Then, one final gasp. A doctor stepped forward and checked him for just over a minute. At 6:05 p.
m. , Mikal Dean Mahdi was pronounced dead. He gave no final statement.
Nothing.
The autopsy report filed a month later changed the narrative. The state’s execution protocol called for three shooters, each firing one bullet aimed directly at the heart. The expectation was three entry wounds, one destroyed heart, near-instant unconsciousness, and a rapid death.
The autopsy showed two wounds, not three. Neither had struck the heart directly. The bullets shattered into metal splinters, destroying the liver and damaging the pancreas.
The heart kept beating. The forensic pathologist noted that Mahdi likely experienced excruciating conscious pain and suffering for 30 to 60 seconds after the shots, consistent with the witnesses’ accounts of his cries and groans.
The state maintained that three bullets struck but two passed through the same entry point. Independent pathologists expressed serious doubt. Mahdi’s lawyers wrote, “A massive botched is exactly what happened.”
South Carolina’s shield law, passed in 2023, protects the identities and training of the execution team from public view. For now, the question of what exactly happened behind that wall remains unanswered.
Mahdi’s execution was the fifth firing squad execution in the United States since 1976. After his death, South Carolina had 26 inmates remaining on death row, only one of whom had been sentenced in the past decade. Captain James Myers, who would have been in his late 70s, had his found his widow in the shed where they were married.
His daughter, Meredith Barnett, said ahead of the execution, “I feel at peace about all of it. It’s difficult to talk about taking someone else’s life, but I do feel like that’s justice.”
Christopher Boggs, the 29-year-old convenience store clerk, never got to see 30. The unnamed man killed in Brunswick County, Virginia, during a 𝒹𝓇𝓊𝑔 deal gone wrong, remained a ghost of the official record. Three lives cut short by a young man born into chaos, failed by systems, and who at 21 admitted his actions were irredeemable.
The judge who sentenced him said he could not find the humanity in him. His fifth-grade teacher said it was there when he was a boy. The truth likely lies somewhere in the space between those statements.
And now, the nation is left with a deeper question: When a state carries out an execution and the autopsy later suggests the condemned man suffered in ways that were not intended, in ways the protocol was specifically designed to prevent, does that change anything? Does it matter how someone dies if we have already decided they deserve to die? The silence in that execution chamber on April 11, 2025, may have been broken by the sound of gunfire, but the reverberations of what happened behind the wall will not fade quickly.