The damp morning air of Taylor’s, South Carolina, hung heavy with an unspoken dread on April 27, 2001. Inside a modest residential home, sixty-two-year-old David Lark and his fifty-nine-year-old wife, Gladys Lark, were beginning their day in quiet peace. They were decent, hardworking people whose lives revolved entirely around their family, completely unaware that a monster was currently walking up their front steps. Outside, the gravel crunched softly under the boots of Brad Keith Sigman, a man consumed by an absolute and toxic obsession.
Sigman’s mind had been completely unraveled by years of severe alcoholism, heavy drug abuse, and a devastating romantic rejection. For three years, he had been in a relationship with Rebecca Barber, a long-time friend whom he had supported after her previous relationship collapsed. They had lived together in a trailer owned by Sigman, but his spiraling addictions eventually made life with him entirely unrunnable. Early that year, Rebecca packed her bags, took her two children, and moved back into the safety of her parents’ home.
Brad Sigman refused to accept that the romance was over, transforming his grief into a terrifying and persistent campaign of harassment. He followed her, called her constantly, and loitered near the Lark residence, desperately demanding that she return to his trailer. The night before the slaughter, Sigman sat in a dimly lit room, heavily consuming THC alongside his friend, Eugene Strufe. As the smoke filled the air, Sigman leaned forward and coldly detailed a twisted plan taking shape in his mind.
He told Strufe that he intended to break into the Lark family home, tie up the elderly parents, and hold them hostage. His ultimate goal was to force Rebecca into a confrontation so she would be compelled to sit down and talk to him. Strufe was horrified by the dark delusion and immediately refused to take any part in such a dangerous crime. Unfazed by his friend’s rejection, Sigman resolved to proceed entirely on his own, his judgment completely clouded by obsession.
On the fateful morning of April 27, Sigman watched from a distance as Rebecca left the house to take her children to school. Seizing the window of opportunity, he walked up to the residence armed with a heavy, solid wooden baseball bat. He breached the door and confronted David and Gladys Lark, aggressively demanding to know exactly when their daughter would return. When the terrified couple bravely refused to cooperate or give him information, Sigman completely lost control and unleashed an animalistic fury.
He chased the elderly couple through the house, turning the quiet home into a horrific, blood-splattered labyrinth of violence. David was cornered in the kitchen, while Gladys tried desperately to find safety in the center of the living room. Sigman moved methodically from room to room, systematically striking both defenseless victims over and over again with the heavy bat. Each victim sustained nine massive, crushing blows directly to the head, resulting in fatal skull fractures that ended their lives.
With the parents lying dead on the floor, Sigman ransacked the house, located David’s personal firearm, and calmly sat down to wait. When Rebecca Barber returned home a short time later, she walked into a trap, confronted by her ex-boyfriend holding a gun. He threatened her life, forcing her out of the house and into the passenger seat of a 2001 Honda Passport. Sigman slammed the accelerator, screaming that he was kidnapping her and taking her across the state line into North Carolina.
As the vehicle sped down the highway, Rebecca realized that her only chance of survival was to risk everything right then. She unlocked the passenger door, threw it open, and bravely leaped from the rapidly moving SUV onto the hard asphalt. Sigman screeched to a halt, leaning out of the window and firing the stolen gun at her as she scrambled away. Miraculously, the bullets missed, and Rebecca managed to escape into the brush, eventually reaching Greenville Memorial Hospital for emergency care.
With his hostage gone and his crimes exposed, Sigman abandoned the vehicle and fled into the dark, sparking a massive manhunt. Warrants were immediately issued for two counts of murder, kidnapping, and assault with intent to kill across the entire United States. For eleven agonizing days, Sigman managed to evade local and federal authorities, hiding out in remote areas and cheap motels. His run finally ended in the tourist town of Gatlinburg, Tennessee, where he was captured and extradited to South Carolina.
Brad Sigman’s formal trial commenced on July 18, 2002, inside a heavily guarded South Carolina courtroom packed with emotional onlookers. The prosecution presented an overwhelming mountain of physical evidence, centering on the blood-stained baseball bat recovered near the primary crime scene. Detective Mike McNamara took the stand, utilizing precise measurements of time and distance to reconstruct Sigman’s movements through the house. The jury deliberated for only a short time before returning with a verdict of guilty and a sentence of death.
As the heavy words were read aloud, Sigman’s mother, Virginia Woot, completely broke down in tears, burying her face in her hands. Rebecca Barber sat perfectly still in the front row, watching the proceedings in a absolute, grief-stricken silence that chilled the room. Sigman turned his head, locking eyes with his former girlfriend one final time before the bailiffs escorted him to death row. He would spend the next twenty-three years locked inside a maximum-security cell as the legal system slowly ground forward.
Over more than two decades, Sigman filed an endless stream of legal appeals, all of which were methodically reviewed and denied. His final execution date was ultimately set for March 7, 2025, forcing him to make a critical statutory choice. Under South Carolina law, he was permitted to choose between the electric chair, lethal injection, or a newly formed firing squad. Sigman deliberately selected the firing squad, a choice that his defense attorneys argued was based on recent, botched lethal injections.
They noted that inmates executed with heavy doses of pentobarbital often appeared to suffer greatly before being formally pronounced dead. To accommodate this method, South Carolina had recently spent approximately five-hundred and forty-four thousand dollars to construct a modern firing squad chamber. The state-of-the-art facility featured thick bulletproof glass for the witness room and a specially designed metal chair with a drainage system. A heavy, engineered wall was constructed with narrow slits to completely conceal the identities of the execution team from onlookers.
The day before he was scheduled to be taken to the chamber, Sigman requested a massive final meal for himself. He asked for three full buckets of Kentucky Fried Chicken original recipe, openly intending to share the food with his peers. Prison officials strictly denied the request due to policy, serving him a much more modest, single portion of fried chicken instead. His final tray consisted of four pieces of chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes with rich gravy, biscuits, cheesecake, and sweet tea.
On the evening of March 7, 2025, Brad Sigman was led into the chamber to face the final judgment of man. He was tightly strapped into the center chair with heavy leather restraints, and a dark cloth hood was placed over his head. Three volunteer prison employees took their positions behind the concealed wall, aiming high-powered rifles directly at a target on his chest. On the warden’s sharp command, all three officers fired live ammunition simultaneously, the deafening cracks echoing violently through the room.
The high-velocity bullets struck Sigman in a tightly grouped pattern directly in the torso, destroying his heart within a millisecond. Witnesses in the observation room flinched at the jarring sound, noting that the physical damage was confined to a single point. He was pronounced dead at exactly 6:08 p.m., bringing an end to a twenty-four-year saga of pain and legal battling. In his final written statement, Sigman heavily opposed the death penalty, utilizing four distinct biblical passages to support his argument.
He argued that nowhere in the New Testament does God grant human institutions the authority to take another person’s life. His final spoken words to the witnesses were clear, delivered without any tremor as he looked out through the dark hood.
“The jury used the law of an eye for an eye as justification to seek the death penalty.”
“At the time, I was too ignorant to understand how wrong that was.”
“Why? Because we no longer live under the law of the Old Testament, but under the law of the New Testament.”
Rebecca Barber sat behind the bulletproof glass, tears streaming down her face as she watched the man who destroyed her family die. In her first public interview in twenty-four years, she expressed that while Sigman’s actions were monstrous, she disagreed with capital punishment. She stated that life imprisonment would have been a more appropriate sentence, adding that death is a decision for God alone. The state had carried out its first firing squad execution in fifteen years, closing a dark chapter in Taylor’s history.
The heat of July 2004 brought a different kind of terror to the East Coast, fueled by a young man named Mikallon Mahdi. At just twenty-one years old, Mahdi embarked on a senseless, hyper-violent crime spree that randomly cut across three different states. His path of destruction began on July 14, 2004, in the quiet town of Lawrenceville, Virginia, where he lived. Without warning, he broke into a neighbor’s property, stole a powerful firearm, and hijacked a vehicle before heading down the highway.
The very next day, July 15, Mahdi pulled his stolen vehicle into a busy Exxon gas station in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Inside the store, twenty-eight-year-old Christopher Jason Boggs was working his normal shift, quietly tending to the counter and helping customers. Mahdi walked inside, grabbed a can of beer, and approached the counter, presenting his identification as Boggs routinely requested it. As the clerk looked down at the card, Mahdi pulled the stolen gun and shot him twice in the face.
The shots were fired at point-blank range, sending Boggs crashing to the floor in a pool of blood behind the counter. Mahdi stepped around the counter and fired a third, unnecessary shot into the helpless clerk as he lay dying on the linoleum. He desperately battered at the buttons of the cash register, attempting to force the drawer open to steal the morning’s earnings. Failing to open the safe, Mahdi simply grabbed his single can of beer, walked out the door, and drove away.
By the early morning hours of July 17, Mahdi had crossed the state line into the city of Columbia, South Carolina. He prowled the streets until he spotted Cory Pitts sitting quietly inside his parked car near a local convenience store. Mahdi marched up to the driver’s side window, flashing a shiny, chrome-plated handgun directly at the terrified driver’s face. He forced Pitts out onto the concrete at gunpoint, hopped into the driver’s seat, and sped off into the night.
At approximately 3:30 a.m. on July 18, Mahdi stopped his newly stolen vehicle at the Wilco Travel Plaza near Interstate 26. After fueling up, he drove deep into a rural area of St. Matthews, pulling up to a large private property. The land belonged to Captain James E. Myers, a highly respected, fifty-six-year-old off-duty officer with the Orangeburg Department of Public Safety. The quiet property was a sacred place for the captain, the exact spot where he had married his wife just months prior.
Mahdi walked onto the property, bypassed the main house, and forcibly broke into a large tool shed near the back line. He found a semi-automatic rifle stored inside, loaded it, and sat in the darkness, waiting patiently for the owner. A few hours later, Captain Myers arrived at his workshop, completely unaware that an armed fugitive was hiding in the shadows. The moment Myers stepped inside the shed, Mahdi sprang from the darkness and opened fire with the high-powered rifle.
He unleashed a torrent of gunfire, shooting at least eight rounds at the captain from a distance of just a few feet. Three of the high-velocity bullets struck Myers directly in the head, killing the veteran law enforcement officer almost instantly. Mahdi then grabbed a container of diesel fuel from the shelf, uncapped it, and callously poured it over the fallen body. He struck a match, igniting the fuel and setting the captain’s remains on fire before turning to steal his property.
Mahdi looted the captain’s personal effects, stealing his official department truck along with an assortment of high-powered service weapons stored inside. He loaded an assault rifle, a shotgun, and a twenty-two caliber rifle into the cab before tearing down the driveway. He pointed the truck south, driving fast toward Florida, leaving behind a scene of absolute devastation that would soon be discovered. That same night, Amy Tripp Myers, who was also a dedicated law enforcement officer, grew deeply concerned about her husband.
James had failed to answer his phone for hours, which was entirely uncharacteristic for the reliable and communicative public safety captain. She climbed into her vehicle and drove down the rural roads to the workshop property to check on his well-being. Walking into the shed, she discovered the heavily burned remains of her husband lying in a massive pool of blood. The horror of the scene would echo through the entire South Carolina law enforcement community, sparking an immediate, multi-state manhunt.
The flight from justice was short-lived, ending abruptly on July 21, 2004, in the coastal town of Satellite Beach, Florida. Alert local police spotted Captain Myers’s distinctive official vehicle cruising down the main highway and immediately moved to box it in. Mahdi slammed the brakes, threw the door open, and attempted to flee into the brush while heavily armed with the stolen weapons. Officers tackled him into the sand, disarming him before he could open fire on the arresting deputies.
In August 2004, a Calhoun County grand jury formally indicted Mikallon Mahdi on charges of murder, grand larceny, and burglary. The state’s legal team immediately filed an official notice of their absolute intent to seek the death penalty for his actions. Recognizing the overwhelming nature of the evidence against him, Mahdi eventually entered a plea of guilty to all the primary charges. He also pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder of Christopher Boggs to resolve his outstanding warrants in North Carolina.
During the intense sentencing phase, Prosecutor David Pasco took the podium, looking directly at the jury while pointing at the defendant. He described Mahdi as the absolute epitome of human evil, a man whose entire soul was filled with pure hatred. The judge affirmed the jury’s recommendation, sentencing the twenty-one-year-old killer to death by the state’s traditional methods of execution. Mahdi was transported directly to Broad River Correctional Institution, where he would wait for his date with the firing squad.
On April 11, 2025, forty-two-year-old Mikallon Mahdi was led from his holding cell into the newly renovated South Carolina execution chamber. Like Brad Sigman before him, Mahdi had deliberately chosen the firing squad over both the electric chair and lethal injection. His defense attorney, David Weiss, publicly stated that his client had merely chosen the lesser of three distinct evils. He argued that when faced with barbaric and inhumane options, the firing squad offered the quickest path to physical cessation.
The day before his scheduled death, Mahdi requested a rich, high-quality final meal to be delivered to his holding cell. He selected a perfectly cooked, medium-rare ribeye steak, a side of rich mushroom risotto, fresh broccoli, kale, cheesecake, and sweet tea. He consumed the meal in relative silence, showing little emotion as the final hours of his life ticked away. The execution process was formally initiated at 6:01 p.m. as the witnesses took their assigned seats.
Mahdi was tightly strapped into the heavy metal chair, and a dark fabric hood was pulled securely down over his face. A medical official moved forward, pinning a white fabric target with a bright red center dot directly over his heart. Three trained members of the Department of Corrections stood behind the slotted wall, holding loaded rifles fifteen feet away. The specialized ammunition was specifically engineered to fragment upon immediate impact with the human rib cage to ensure rapid death.
On the warden’s signal, the three shooters pulled their triggers simultaneously, sending three heavy rounds tearing through the air. Witnesses in the room reported that Mahdi let out a sharp scream as the bullets struck his chest, flexing his arms. His torso strained against the leather straps as his lungs continued to expand and contract deeply in an involuntary reaction. He continued breathing heavily for approximately eighty seconds to two full minutes before his body finally went completely still.
A prison physician stepped forward, placed a stethoscope against the blood-soaked target, and listened intently for a full sixty seconds. Finding no signs of life, the doctor stepped back and pronounced Mikallon Mahdi dead at exactly 6:05 p.m. Mahdi chose to make no final verbal statement to the family members or the state officials gathered in the room. Following the execution, his attorney filed a formal complaint with the South Carolina Supreme Court regarding the process.
Weiss alleged that the execution had been improperly handled, claiming that only two of the three fired bullets actually struck Mahdi. He argued that this technical failure caused his client to experience conscious, excruciating pain for over a minute before dying. The controversy sparked an intense public debate regarding the alleged humane nature of the firing squad in modern capital punishment. For the family of Captain Myers, however, the long-awaited execution brought a somber closure to two decades of profound grief.
The cycle of violence returned to South Carolina in October 2004, driven by a twenty-three-year-old named Steven Corey Bryant. Over a terrifying eight-day period, Bryant unleashed an unprovoked and calculated rampage across the rural landscape of Sumter County. His chaotic string of crimes paralyzed the local population, turning quiet country roads into hunting grounds for a nomadic killer. Bryant was an avid fisherman who spent his free time roaming the banks of the Black River, searching for easy targets.
On the dark night of October 8, Bryant was walking near the water when he spotted fifty-six-year-old Clinton Brown fishing alone. Without a single word of warning or any apparent provocation, Bryant raised a handgun and shot Brown directly in the back. The bullet tore through muscle, but miraculously missed Brown’s vital organs, leaving him bleeding heavily on the muddy riverbank. Showing immense strength, Brown dragged himself to his truck and managed to drive to a regional hospital, surviving the random attack.
The shooting of Clinton Brown was merely a violent prelude to a much darker campaign of terror that Bryant was planning. The very next day, October 9, Bryant met up with his close friend and regular construction co-worker, Clifton Gayfield. The two men were incredibly close, regularly fishing together and spending significant time around each other’s young children and wives. That afternoon, under the casual pretext of driving to a local gas station to buy beer, Bryant lured Gayfield into his car.
As they drove down a lonely, unpaved rural road, Bryant pulled a stolen handgun and shot Gayfield directly in the head. The shot killed his close friend instantly, extinguishing his life before he could even process the ultimate betrayal of trust. Bryant pushed the body out of the passenger door, leaving it face down in the dirt before driving away. Two days later, on October 11, Bryant turned his violent attention toward a complete stranger living in isolation.
He drove to the remote residence of sixty-two-year-old Willard Tichon, a quiet man who lived completely alone at the county line. Bryant walked up to the front porch and knocked loudly, utilizing a deceptive tactic he had practiced in his mind. When Tichon opened the door, Bryant feigned distress, claiming his vehicle had broken down down the road and he needed water. Tichon, a naturally kind and hospitable man, smiled and invited the young stranger inside his home to use the phone.
The moment he stepped across the threshold, Bryant pulled his weapon and shot the elderly man nine times at close range. The brutality did not stop with the gunfire; Bryant walked over to the corpse and performed an act of sickening sadism. He pulled a lighter from his pocket and systematically burned the victim’s eyes with lit cigarettes to degrade him. He then began casually ransacking the quiet home, piling jewelry, expensive power tools, and family heirlooms into a canvas bag.
As he was sliding a silver watch into his pocket, the telephone on the kitchen counter began to ring loudly. It was Tichon’s daughter, Kimberly Deas, calling from her home in another state to check on her elderly father. Bryant stood in the quiet kitchen, listening to the persistent ringing for several minutes before finally deciding to pick up. He pressed the receiver to his ear, his breathing steady as the worried woman spoke into the line.
“Who is this?” Kimberly asked, her voice instantly tightening with panic when she heard an unfamiliar, heavy breath on the phone.
“I’m the prowler,” Bryant replied, his tone entirely casual as he looked down at the blood pool on the floor.
“Where is my father?” she demanded, her voice shaking violently as she stood in her kitchen miles away.
“You can’t talk to him,” Bryant said, letting out a low, chilling laugh that echoed through the wire. “I killed him three hours ago.”
Before she could scream, Bryant hung up the phone, the line going completely dead as Kimberly collapsed in absolute horror. Bryant turned back to the room, using Tichon’s pooling blood as paint to write taunting messages across the white walls. He scrawled the phrases “Victim four in two weeks” and “Catch me if you can” in large, jagged crimson letters. Before walking out the front door, he placed several lit candles around the body, transforming the room into a macabre altar.
Exactly two days later, on October 13, 2004, the nomadic killer pulled his vehicle into a rural convenience store parking lot. There he encountered thirty-five-year-old Christopher Earl Burgess, an acquaintance he knew casually from around the small town. The two men chatted amiably by the counter for a few minutes before walking out into the humid afternoon air together. Bryant offered Burgess a ride down the highway, an invitation that Burgess accepted without a single thought of danger.
Bryant steered the car down a lonely stretch of road, pulled over near a deep drainage ditch, and drew his gun. He shot Burgess twice, once directly in the head and once in the chest, killing him before he could move. Bryant pushed the heavy body into the deep brush of the ditch and sped away, completely unbothered by the slaughter. Less than two hours later, a local deer hunter passing through the woods discovered the fresh remains and called the police.
Later that identical afternoon, a heavily armed tactical unit swarmed a small residential home belonging to Bryant’s current girlfriend. They breached the doors and arrested Steven Corey Bryant without a fight as he sat on the living room sofa. Investigators quickly gathered a mountain of solid physical evidence linking the twenty-three-year-old to every single one of the regional crimes. Officers recovered the stolen firearms, multiple items taken from Tichon’s home, and blood-splattered clothing matching descriptions given by witnesses.
On October 14, Bryant was formally charged with three counts of malice murder, aggravated burglary, armed robbery, and arson. Even after being secured inside a maximum-security holding cell, his violent tendencies showed absolutely no signs of slowing down. In October 2005, while awaiting his formal trial at the Sumter-Lee Regional Detention Center, Bryant brutally attacked a guard. He ambushed the officer in the hallway, punching him repeatedly in the face even after the man was unconscious.
The highly anticipated sentencing phase finally commenced on September 2, 2008, before a prominent South Carolina circuit judge. The defense team argued aggressively against the death penalty, focusing heavily on portraying a childhood defined by extreme personal trauma. Performance experts took the stand, detailing a history of severe physical abuse that state institutions had completely failed to address. On September 11, 2008, the jury rejected the plea for mercy, finding Bryant guilty on all capital counts.
He received a formal sentence of death for the burglary-murder of Willard Tichon, alongside consecutive life sentences for the other killings. Over the next sixteen years and nine months, Bryant’s appellate attorneys exhausted every single legal remedy available in the country. They filed dozens of complex appeals based on structural constitutional arguments, attempting to delay the execution indefinitely through the courts. On October 14, 2025, the United States Supreme Court denied his final petition, clearing the path for the state.
South Carolina Attorney General Kristen Clark immediately filed a formal motion requesting the supreme court to set an official execution date. The formal death warrant was delivered to Bryant in his cell at the Broad River Correctional Institution on October 17. Under long-standing state statutes, the execution must be scheduled for the fourth Friday following the receipt of the judicial order. This legal calculation established Friday, November 14, 2025, as the final day of Steven Corey Bryant’s life.
On October 31, exactly fourteen days prior to the date, the warden visited Bryant to present his statutory options. Bryant sat at his concrete table and deliberately selected death by firing squad, signing the official paperwork with a steady hand. With that signature, he became the third death row inmate in South Carolina to opt for the newly restored method. He spent his final weeks in absolute isolation, refusing to request or accept any visits from his surviving family.
The morning of November 14 arrived with a cold, biting frost that coated the prison yard fences in thin ice. Bryant was awakened by the guards at exactly 4:00 a.m., instructing him to shower and put on his clean jumpsuit. He received a brief spiritual visit from the prison chaplain, who offered a final prayer before the process began. As part of the standard operating procedure for firing squads, medical staff administered heavy sedatives to reduce his physical anxiety.
At 5:45 p.m., the extraction team entered the cell and escorted the heavily sedated prisoner down the long hallway. He was guided into the five-hundred-thousand-dollar chamber and securely fastened to the heavy iron chair with thick leather straps. A medical official moved forward, pressing his fingers against Bryant’s uniform to locate the exact position of the heart. He pinned a white canvas target directly over the spot, and a black hood was pulled down over Bryant’s head.
The warden stepped to the microphone, reading the execution order aloud to the state witnesses gathered behind the thick glass. At exactly 6:10 p.m., the three hidden shooters fired their high-powered rifles simultaneously through the narrow slits in the wall. Three heavy thirty-point-zero-six caliber rounds tore through the air, striking Bryant’s chest in an incredibly rapid, explosive succession. His body exhibited sharp, involuntary muscular movements against the restraints as the high-velocity rounds destroyed his internal organs completely.
Neurological death occurred within a matter of seconds, though his chest continued to twitch reflexively for several minutes in the quiet. The county coroner walked forward with his stethoscope, checking for a pulse before pronouncing Steven Corey Bryant dead at 6:20 p.m. Bryant chose to utter no final words of remorse to the families of the victims he had brutally slaughtered. The state had carried out its third firing squad execution of the year, closing a modern era of capital punishment.
