Execution set for man who killed Orangeburg police captain
COLUMBIA, S.C. - The state of South Carolina has set an execution date for a man who killed an off-duty Orangeburg police captain in 2004.
State officials said Mikal Mahdi is set to be executed on April 11, 2025.
Mikal Mahdi, 42, murdered Orangeburg County Public Safety Captain James Myers, 56, in July 2004 by shooting him nine times, dousing his body in diesel and lighting his body on fire inside a shed in Calhoun County.
Mahdi had been hiding in the shed to evade police, who were pursuing him due to a crime spree across several states.
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In addition to killing Myers, Mahdi also murdered 29-year-old Christopher Boggs, a convenience store clerk, while robbing an Exxon gas station in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
After the robbery, Mahdi went on the run and carjacked an SUV from a driver in Columbia, which he later ditched to hide in the shed. That shed was a mile from Myers’s property. After killing Myers, Mahdi fled to Satellite Beach, Florida, where he was eventually arrested.
Mahdi pled guilty to murder in November 2006 because he thought he would have been convicted. Two months later, Judge Clifton Newman, who sentenced convicted killer Alex Murdaugh to life in prison in 2023, sentenced Mahdi to death.
In his reasoning for giving him the death sentence, Newman said that Mahdi could not adapt to prison because he had repeatedly threatened law enforcement officers.
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David Weiss, Assistant Federal Public Defender at the Capital Habeas Unit for the Fourth Circuit, made the following statement on behalf of Mahdi’s legal team in response to his scheduled execution:
“Today, the state of South Carolina took a devastating step toward executing Mikal Madhi for two tragic murders he committed when he was just 21 years old, and after he had endured years of abuse and trauma as a child. By the time he was in second grade, Mikal was already expressing suicidal thoughts and mental despair – the first of many heartbreaking signs of how desperately he needed help.
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But instead, as a teenager, Mikal spent hundreds of hours in solitary confinement in youth prisons. He was repeatedly failed by his own family and the justice system, who neglected to see him for who he was: a wounded child in need of . Mikal’s story is one of trauma, neglect, and the many missed opportunities for providing him the safety and comion that every child should have. We hope to show the courts that the justice system, in repeatedly overlooking Mikal’s humanity, denied him the fair trial he needed and deserved.
We urge the state of South Carolina to review his case, including the abuse he suffered as a child, his struggles with mental health, and the trauma that marred his life and propelled him towards violence.”
Mahdi has not yet chosen one of the three execution methods legal in South Carolina: lethal injection, electric chair or firing squad.
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