Camp Swamp Road Ep. 4: That’s What Heaven Is For
Read the Reporting:
Police Say He Killed in Self-Defense. His Phone Tells Another Story.
‘You’re Taken Care of’: Did Police Promise to Shield a Killer?
Nobody Suspected Police Shielded a Killer Until the Dead Man’s Sister Dug In
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Transcript
A word of warning.
This series contains descriptions of violence in strong language, including unbleeped curse words.
Please be advised.
Previously, on Camp Swamp Road, and there they were.
What?
The 90 phone calls.
All these officers are saying we're fine.
They're saying they keep telling each other this is cut and dry.
This is cut and dry.
I was working.
I was in the shadows last last night.
I weren't there, but I was in the shadows.
I chased him.
Oh, I was on his ass and he could, his truck couldn't outrun my truck.
And he knew it.
So yeah, he was terrified.
No one listened to these.
And then they want to stand in front of my family and say, we looked at all the evidence and we've come to this conclusion.
For more than two years, Jennifer Foley has been an advocate for her brother, Scott Spivey, and she says she wants accountability for his killers, Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams.
Boyd and Williams deny any wrongdoing.
With the discovery of 90 phone calls in the police file, Jennifer found a window into Weldon Boyd's mind.
But she also stumbled across evidence of corruption within the Horry County Police Department.
In early March 2025, Jennifer's lawyer Mark Tinsley notified Horry County police about the calls.
They quickly opened an internal investigation.
The first domino to fall was Deputy Chief Brandon Strickland.
Strickland and Boyd had talked over the phone multiple times in the hours and days after the shooting.
In the calls, Strickland seems to be offering help to Boyd, saying he had the right people coming.
Strickland had been a rising star in the force, on track to becoming chief of police.
But just days after the Horry County Police Department found out that the calls existed, Strickland was forced to retire.
Strickland's lawyer, Bert von Hermann, said his client didn't know he was being recorded and regrets the tone of some of his comments.
The lawyer added, quote, there's a huge difference between public corruption and poor taste.
But there was more.
A lot more.
Beyond the calls between Strickland and Boyd, the police file contained hours of body cam and dash cam footage from Camp Swamp Road.
And that footage revealed that Brandon Strickland wasn't the only officer trying to help Weldon Boyd on the night of the shooting.
You dumbass.
That's Sergeant Damon Viscovy.
Remember him?
He's the officer who helped manage the crime scene.
Get your car out of the way now.
Around 40 minutes after Vescovy arrives at Camp Swamp Road, he makes a phone call.
We don't know who he's talking to.
Hey,
are you coming up here?
Well you suck.
Who are you sending?
Watching Viscovi's body cam, you can see he's standing next to his cruiser with the door open.
Right after he hangs up the phone, he scribbles something down on a notepad out of view.
Viscovi picks up the notepad and flips it around.
As the pages flick by, his body cam catches what he wrote.
The message is almost impossible to see until you slow the footage down.
Way down.
Frame by frame.
Written in all caps.
Act like a victim.
Camera.
Vescovy takes his note and walks over to Boyd and Williams.
who are sitting on the back of Boyd's trailer.
Vescovy stands in front of them with the notepad.
He He says nothing.
Boyd and Williams look up at him.
Boyd's eyes go wide.
I was like, you're kidding me.
It just keeps getting more and more absurd.
When she was made aware of the Act Like a Victim note, Jennifer was shocked.
How can these people live with themselves?
How can they go home at night and look at themselves in the mirror and say, I did a good job today?
My job is is to protect and serve, and I did a daggone good job today.
Over a year ago, the state attorney general's office closed their file on the Scotts Bivey case.
Jennifer wants it reopened.
To her, all these examples of police corruption-the Brandon Strickland calls, and now the Viscovi note-they prove that there was a miscarriage of justice.
But not everyone in law enforcement will see it that way.
I'm Valerie Borwine, and this is Camp Swamp Road, a series from the journal.
Coming up, our last episode, episode 4.
That's what Heaven is for.
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All right, so good afternoon.
I wanted to welcome you all here to discuss a news release we have just released.
On April 30th of this year, Horry County Police Chief Chris Lynn Hart held a press conference.
Horry County Police Department has terminated a patrol division sergeant as part of an ongoing internal affairs investigation related to employee conduct in the Camp Swamp Road shooting investigation from September of 2023.
The Act Like a Victim note was first found by an investigative journalist with LunaShark Media, a podcast company based in South Carolina.
After the note was discovered, Sergeant Viscovi was quickly fired.
Effective April 30th, 2025, Paul Damon Viscovi is no longer an employee of Horry County.
And then, just days after Viscovi was fired, Chief Landhart held yet another press conference.
We have discovered last week seven additional videos that were improperly labeled.
Those were reviewed and sent over to SLID as a continuation of the misconduct investigation, as well as our internal affairs investigation to conduct.
Lenhart said three Horry County police officers were facing disciplinary action.
After hearing that some of the body and dash cam footage from Camp Swamp Road was, quote, improperly labeled, I went deeper into the footage myself.
And what I discovered was not only had there been mislabeled footage, but there was also almost two hours of footage that didn't seem to have been recorded at all.
At the crime scene, right around 7 p.m., the ranking police officer gives a direction that other officers turn off their cameras.
The body cams do not appear to go back on until just after 9 p.m.
When asked why the officers were told to turn off their cameras, the Horry County Police Department didn't respond.
Beyond the internal investigation, a state-level investigation is launched into official official misconduct within the Horry County Police Department.
What had started as an open-and-shut case of self-defense was now turning into a full-blown crisis.
A fatal road rage incident involving 33-year-old Scott Spivey is under renewed scrutiny after an audio recording came to light.
Phone call recordings we recently obtained and played for you last night reveal conversations between the shooter and his...
Over a year and a half after Scott Spivey was killed, corruption in the Horry County Police Department had become headline news statewide.
Chief Len Hart says the Horry County Police Department now has three investigators that will work on the Spivey case every day to review any misconduct and policy violations by the police department.
And on TikTok, people are debating the finer points of the Spivey case.
Scott Spivey was killed in a Stand Your Crown self-defense case, or at least that's what they called it initially.
At what point do they think that maybe Spivey feared for his life and was trying to get away?
Act like a victim, camera.
Google the name Weldon Boyd.
Go on Facebook and search up the name Weldon Boyd.
Weldon Boyd took to Facebook.
He posted what he called a press release on the page of his restaurant, Boys on the Boulevard.
In it, he wrote, quote, enough is enough.
With the lies, conspiracy of politicians, family court attorneys, the shooters' attorneys, and TikTokers who seek to profit from misinformation.
I've remained compliant and silent throughout investigations and a civil suit motivated by money.
When did the momentum,
when did you start to feel it shifting?
When I felt like
everybody started saying, this isn't right.
And they started being very vocal about it.
And they were like, what can we do?
Like people are reaching out saying, what can we do?
South Carolina Highway 9.
Headed straight towards a northern state line.
Feelings about this case have run high in Ori County.
A song has even been written about Scott Spivey by a musician from the area.
Standing your ground with no ground to stand.
Firing rounds
In response to the public outrage, the Horry County Council invited Jennifer to speak at one of its meetings.
Next up is Jennifer Coley.
If I mispronounced that, I apologize.
The council wanted to hear what she had to say, and so did the public.
The chamber is packed.
Good evening.
Before I begin, can I ask, if you don't mind everyone that is here for Scott tonight if you allow them to stand up to see the support?
Would you mind that before I begin?
I believe we see him there, but that will be following us.
I don't think it might have done.
The council members watch as almost the entire room stands up.
The words hanging over the door of Horry County Police Department reads, professionals at work for you.
These words carry a hollow meaning for my family.
Jennifer speaks for several minutes, laying out everything that her family experienced at the hands of the Horry County Police Department, including the way they treated her brother's body.
Scott was left in his truck in 77-degree heat for six hours, sealed up and towed across county to have his body drug out on the ground, stripped, and photographed in the impound lot.
Jennifer tells the counsel what she heard in Weldon Boyd's phone calls, that this wasn't a stand-your-ground case.
Right from the beginning,
Emboy's own admission in his tape to his mother, between me and you, mama.
Yes, Scott knew he was being followed.
He just ran me off the road and I was like, F that guy, and I chased him.
I was on his ass.
And his truck couldn't outrun mine.
And Scott knew it.
Scott was terrified.
Those are his ones.
Imagine being chased down and somebody telling you that this is a stand-your-ground case.
Jennifer implores the counsel to ask the governor of South Carolina to appoint an independent prosecutor.
All we have ever wanted was the truth, and we will continue to advocate for Scott's case very open with a thorough investigation by an honest prosecutor who is willing to actually review all the evidence, apply South Carolina's laws to the actions of that day.
When she finishes her speech, the crowd gives Jennifer a standing ovation.
And I pray that you all sleep tonight knowing that no blind eye can be turned to Scott Spivey anymore.
Thank you.
Thank you, Mel.
Thank you.
Just over a year earlier, the South Carolina Attorney General's office had closed the Spivey case.
Jennifer and her family had been alone in calling for the case to be reopened.
Now, with the discovery of the phone calls and the corruption at the Gorry County Police Department, the Spiveys were gaining new allies.
I firmly believe this was not a stand-your-ground situation.
Lucas Atkinson is a state legislator whose district includes part of Horry County.
I spoke to him in a coffee shop not far from Camp Swamp Road.
No matter what the law says in this, I mean, that's just my opinion.
I don't know.
If it's not stand-your-ground, what is it?
I mean, I think it was just murder.
Let's say I have a gun on my side.
We argue.
I turn around and leave.
Can you sit there and chase me eight miles down the road and just we get out and you shoot and kill me?
I mean, I just, I just, hard for me to believe, you know, it's
just hard for me to believe that.
Lucas is one of nine state legislators who wrote a letter to Henry McMaster, the governor of South Carolina.
The group asked the governor to reopen the case, saying, quote, many of our constituents believe the incident was prematurely deemed self-defense.
I've known Henry McMaster for a long time.
I first met him years ago when I was a state politics reporter in Columbia, the capital of South Carolina.
Governor McMaster hadn't formally responded to the lawmaker's letter about the Spivey case, and I wanted to find out why.
Governor!
You as well, so good to see you.
I met up with Governor McMaster in July.
we sat down in plush chairs in an ornate library inside the governor's mansion
at mcmaster's feet was his english bulldog mac
is this the right chair to be sitting in oh you ain't taking a picture man this is this is a podcast
a podcast podcast
i asked about the law at the center of this story south carolina's standard ground law was an expansion of pre-existing self-defense laws.
It removed the duty to retreat when a person is in fear for their their life and in a place where they have the right to be, including their vehicle.
Governor McMaster was the state attorney general in 2006 when the law was enacted.
Were you a supporter of it?
Sure.
Why?
You ought to be able to stand your ground.
Somebody's
pushing you around.
I mean, I know you turn the other cheek and those kinds of things, but
how far do you have to run?
Do you have to keep running if they keep coming?
I think it's very reasonable.
The governor told me that the way Standard Ground is being interpreted in the Spavi case raises some serious questions.
It would be an
unusual circumstance to have a law that's intended to do something good that could be used
for such an injustice.
If this, but we don't, I don't know the facts, so I can't say who's right or who's wrong.
I think there's some questions.
I think they're
entitled to some answers.
I don't know if we'll get them, but I think they're entitled.
It's not the governor's role to reopen this case or appoint a special prosecutor.
But Governor McMaster does have a powerful voice in South Carolina, and he could put pressure on law enforcement to look at the criminal case again.
So far, he hasn't done that.
However, he does have a few words for the Spivey family.
Sorry the whole thing happened.
I mean you got a dead man for
no good reason.
That's not good
and they'll never get over it.
This case, this incident, this death, is a tragedy.
It seems like we just, we're full of tragedies.
Wish we had lives without tragedies.
That's what heaven's for.
Ultimately, Governor McMaster says that the decision to reopen the Spivey case isn't his to make.
That decision lies with South Carolina's Attorney General.
I speak to him next.
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The power to bring criminal charges in the Scotts Bivey case rests with South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson.
His office closed the case back in 2024.
Wilson had said very little about Scotts Bivey since then, but in August of this year, he released a statement.
In that statement, Wilson reaffirmed his office's original decision that what happened on Camp Swamp Road was clearly a standard ground case.
What was your reaction?
A news reporter sent it to me, and
they're like, we just got this.
It was leaked to us.
We just want to make sure you were the first one to know about it.
And I read it and I couldn't get past the second paragraph.
And after that, I mean, I just laid in my kitchen floor and I just cried hysterically.
In the August statement, Wilson said, quote, if new material evidence comes to light, whether through the ongoing civil proceedings, further investigation, or new reports to law enforcement, we are fully prepared to reevaluate the case.
To Jennifer, Weldon Boyd's phone calls were new material evidence because when Wilson's office closed the case back in 2024, No one there had actually listened to them.
The recordings did not factor into their decision.
Jennifer couldn't accept that Attorney General Wilson could listen to these recordings now and stand by his original decision to not bring criminal charges.
I've followed Alan Wilson's career for a long time, and I also sat behind him in a courtroom for six weeks on a different case.
After his statement on the Spivey killing, I put in a request for an interview, and Wilson agreed to talk.
Doing well.
I've got about 15 or so-ish minutes.
So I don't know if, I don't know if that gives you a lot of time.
I won't offer any chit-chat.
Let's go.
Wilson is a busy man.
In addition to being attorney general, he recently launched a campaign for governor of South Carolina.
He's vying to win next year's Republican primary.
Why should people vote for you to be governor?
Well, as the four-term attorney general, I have taken many positions in support of South Carolina's laws and defense of the Constitution.
When you think about who the next governor is, the next governor is the commander of the National Guard and making tough decisions is something the governor has to do.
And that is something I have had to do as Attorney General.
The very reason for this interview right now is to answer, to make tough decisions, and then be held accountable for them.
Wilson has been getting a lot of criticism for his decision not to reopen the Scotts-Five case.
That criticism is coming from voters and other elected officials, especially Norway County.
The loudest attacks, though, are from Wilson's main opponent in the governor's race.
Let's welcome your next South Carolina, America First, Governor MAGA Mace.
South Carolina Congresswoman Nancy Mace describes herself as, quote, Trump and high heels.
She argues that the criminal investigation into the death of Scott Spivey should be reopened.
Mace has even met with the Spivey family and posted photos with them on Facebook.
In Horry County over the summer, Mace spoke at a campaign event.
The Attorney General of South Carolina, who is refusing to investigate the death and the killing of Scott Sfivey.
And there are tapes we know that he was chased nine miles down the road.
I spoke with Nancy Mace.
She believes that there was a real injustice here.
And with this message, Mace is hoping to win over voters in Horry County.
And those voters are important.
Horrie is one of the biggest Republican strongholds in South Carolina.
It's key to winning any statewide election.
To Jennifer, it seems that Alan Wilson released the statement in August to get ahead of his opponents in the governor's race.
But when I asked the Attorney General about that, he said that the statement had nothing to do with politics.
Here's the thing.
The political thing to do
would be to
reopen this investigative file that we no longer have.
It's been handed back.
And to come to a different conclusion.
That would be the political thing to do.
We don't have any friends to reward or we don't have any enemies to punish.
All we have are the facts of this case and the law as we have.
That's all we have.
I wanted to ask Alan Wilson about everything that Jennifer had found and whether it factored into his decision that this is a standard ground case.
I asked him about what Weldon Boyd said in his phone calls.
Things quickly got got tense.
As you know, well, from these calls, Mr.
Boyd has said, I was on his ass.
I was chasing him.
He was terrified.
He couldn't outrun me.
When did Mr.
Boyd?
Does that matter?
Well, first off, the statements, first off, I think the statements are reprehensible.
But Mr.
Boyd said, when did Mr.
Boyd say that?
He said that within 48 hours of the death.
He said it in some of his recorded calls.
So, yes, he said that.
He's telling you his own.
That's the closest we can get to his state of mind.
Actually, you're incorrect.
The closest we can get to Mr.
Boyd's state of mind is what he's saying in real time on 911 when he's actually involved, when he's following, after he has just been run off the road by Mr.
Spivey.
Hey, I've got a guy pointing a gun at me driving.
We're armed as well.
He keeps throwing the gun in our faces.
I don't like he's about to shoot us.
If he keeps this up, I'm going to shoot him.
We have his state of mind as he is talking to the 911 operator.
So that 911 call that occurred prior to the shooting is relevant to going to Mr.
Boyd's state of mind.
I didn't do it.
I was talking to my friend.
We're trailer and couches.
And this dude just, my buddy's like, what the fuck?
And he's got a gun aimed at us next to us.
All the witnesses, you're talking about everything leading up to that moment in time was multiple witnesses, including Mr.
Boyd, describing an erratic driver.
He's all over the road.
And I have his license plate number.
Okay.
Okay, he's waving the gun right now.
He's waving it out the window at everybody.
I don't know if he's under the influence of anything because he's all over the road.
The multiple eyewitnesses that witness the same thing Mr.
Boyd is telling the 911 operator that corroborate Mr.
Boyd's version of the facts go to the truthfulness of what Mr.
Boyd is saying.
Mr.
Boyd's asked you this then.
Have you found this?
Have you heard these calls?
Sure.
Yes, sure.
Yes, I've heard these calls.
And do they matter?
Do they matter?
The calls matter
to the extent that you have to, what was Mr.
Boyd's intent at the time of the shooting, excuse me, what was his state of mind at the time of the shooting?
What was his intent?
According to Wilson's interpretation of South Carolina stand-up ground law, the only thing that matters is Boyd's state of mind when he pulled the trigger.
And Wilson says the only relevant phone calls that reflect that state of mind are the ones made to 911.
Now, if Mr.
Boyd's statements were something to the effect of, I was going to get that guy, I've been trying to kill him for several days and we planned this whole thing, that's different.
But him.
But it was, and forgive me for saying this, it was, I had a fucking blast.
I enjoyed it.
I mean, doesn't that, doesn't that belie
him being in fear of his life?
Horrible statements,
reprehensible.
But the and that is evidence that somebody might want to use to make that argument you're making.
You know, Mr.
Boyd had a legal right to be on the road.
Mr.
Boyd even had a legal right to perform a citizen's arrest.
I'm not saying it would have been good judgment, but what I'm saying is, is at the point of the shooting, and I'm going to paraphrase the Standard Ground Law, but the Standard Ground Law says that if you are somewhere, you have a lawful right to be,
and while you are there, you believe that someone means to cause you imminent harm or death.
You are allowed under the law to meet force force,
okay?
And including deadly force.
And did Mr.
Boyd have a right to be on that public road?
Legally, he did.
Did Mr.
Boyd,
based on the evidence that we currently have,
did he appear to be in fear imminently of his life being ended?
He said that multiple times to the 911 operator.
I also wanted to ask Wilson about misconduct within the Horry County Police Department.
When we get to that, Wilson says that whatever the police did, it's irrelevant to whether this was stand or ground.
Two things can be true at once.
Law enforcement does something bad or is incompetent at their job.
I don't know what the answer will be.
But does that change the facts of what Mr.
Boyd perceived and all those motorists perceived at the time that they saw Mr.
Spivey get out of his car with his pistol?
But those same officers were the recorder of the facts, right?
They provided the 911 calls.
They took the witness statements, all that sort of thing.
Can we trust that evidence?
Are you asking me, can I trust a video with my own eyes?
I mean, look, if there is,
here's the thing.
Valerie, what are you asking me?
Are you saying that if a bad cop,
we take a bad cop's body cam or a 911 operator's video recording, and we say because they're bad, that the video recording and the video footage is somehow tainted?
But
what I'm asking, Alan, is we have the deputy chief saying I have the right ones coming.
We have video of an officer coaching Mr.
Boyd on how to act.
The investigation
came to you in a way that is suspect.
Valerie, if something changes the facts of the shooting, we're happy to review those facts in light of the facts as we've given them.
Jennifer told me that she and her family had contacted Alan Wilson's office multiple times in hopes of trying to talk with him.
In our interview, Wilson said he was unaware that they had called.
He has since reached out to them.
Do you have any message for them, for the family?
Absolutely.
I think Mr.
Spivey's death is tragic.
I think it's horrible, and I hate that it happened.
I am not,
this is not a pro-Boyd decision and an anti-Spivey decision.
This is a decision by prosecutors in office who reviewed facts, reviewed law, applied them, made a dispassionate decision as we are required to do without any regard for politics.
If that's what he's going to say, then literally every murder case in the state of South Carolina can just say, hey, I was in fear for my life, so I shot and killed him.
Jennifer is worried that Wilson's interpretation of the law could set a dangerous precedent.
That there could be many more Scott Spiveys, more homicides that go uninvestigated, just because the killer said they were in fear for their life.
You're literally opening up Pandora's box.
It doesn't make sense.
No one thinks it makes sense.
So make it make sense, Alan Wilson.
Like, it doesn't make sense.
And that's my fear: is that if you're saying that this is okay, get ready because you're getting ready to have a lot more cases because people have under, now they know what they can do to get away with it.
In the course of my reporting, I was surprised to learn that the future that Jennifer is worried about is already here.
Across America, more people are killing other people while claiming to be in fear for their life.
And since I began working on the story, I've heard from other families, families in Stanier Ground states whose loved ones were killed in shootings and were then told the killer wasn't charged.
The more I look for these kinds of cases, the more I found.
The driver of the car shot him, telling police he feared for his life.
Like the family of Carson Senfield, who was shot after he tried to get into the wrong parked car on his birthday.
His family believes Senfield thought the car was an Uber.
The shooter, who has not been named, says he feared for his life.
He will not face charges under Florida's stand-your-ground law.
Or in Kentucky, where a man named Walter Tribolo was shot and killed in his driveway by a next-door neighbor.
Tribolo's family says they've been locked out of the police investigation.
And then I went up to him and I asked him why.
Why?
Why did you do this?
Why did you kill my son?
Answers she may not get because no one has been charged.
Or in Utah, where a family is looking for answers after Patrick Hayes was shot and killed in a road rage incident.
The killer has not been charged in connection with the shooting.
This guy tried to hit him twice with his truck and then rolls down his window to shoot him and then he's claiming self-defense.
After hearing about these cases, I wanted to find out what broader impact standard ground laws have had on national homicide rates.
Just last year, the Rand Corporation published an in-depth analysis of academic research into standard ground laws.
The journal talked with a co-author of that report, who said that researchers found that there has been a significant increase in gun homicides since these statutes were enacted.
Another assessment put a figure on it.
The 28 states with standard ground laws have raised the number of homicides nationally by as much as 700 gun deaths a year.
Many of these killings go uninvestigated, and killers walk away without charges.
These cases have become so much more frequent that gun owners are now able to buy insurance that will cover their legal expenses if they kill in self-defense.
It's known as murder insurance.
An estimated 2 million Americans have signed up for it.
Jennifer Foley had hoped the new evidence she uncovered would convince powerful people in South Carolina to reopen the criminal investigation.
That isn't happening.
Now her only recourse is a wrongful death lawsuit in civil court.
The next step is a hearing expected to happen later this year.
A judge will decide whether Weldon Boyd and Bradley Williams were really acting in self-defense when they killed Scott Spivey.
So what are the stakes in this hearing?
And what's the best case scenario for you and what's the worst?
Best case scenario is that the judge says that
he doesn't believe that this qualifies for stand your ground because they brought the difficulty onto themselves.
Worst case scenario, the judge says, nope, this is stand your ground and they receive immunity, which means they get criminal and civil immunity.
My wrongful death case is dismissed.
You know, it squashes everything.
At that hearing, Judge Eugene C.
Bubba Griffith Jr.
will hear from witnesses.
Throughout my reporting, I have spoken to witnesses who saw what happened leading up to the shooting on Camp Swamp Road.
But I've determined that the only three people who actually saw the whole thing were Boyd, Williams, and Scott Spivey.
For several months, I've wanted to interview Boyd and Williams, but my requests have been denied through their legal team, at least until after the hearing is over.
In August, however, someone from their side did agree to talk to me.
Tell us your name and what you do.
Well,
Morgan Martin, I am an attorney of some 45 years, probably.
Morgan Martin represents Bradley Williams.
He stepped in to help Williams' other lawyer, a man named Robert E.
Lee III.
When I spoke to Morgan, he wanted to tell me about his client and his client's friend.
Let me say this.
Bradley, Kenneth Bradley Williams, he's a hardworking,
great American young man.
He's the salt of the earth.
He's married.
He's got a child.
He works hard every day.
He's quiet.
He's a quiet guy.
And when I met him, I like him.
And I believe that he was clearly acting in self-defense.
And so I want to defend him.
And what about Weldon Boyd?
How would you describe him?
Well, I don't know Weldon as well, but I think Weldon's a fine young man from what I can see.
He's a worked hard.
He's a business owner there in North Myrtle Beach.
Morgan will be the lead lawyer for the defense team during the hearing.
And he makes the same argument that Attorney General Alan Wilson makes.
Some of the statements that I heard particularly that Mr.
Boyd made are unfortunate.
And,
you know, they've been better off if those comments probably had not been made.
But I'll say again that that doesn't change the facts of what happened in this case.
To Morgan, everything that Jennifer uncovered simply isn't relevant to the civil case.
And he feels the same way about the police corruption, including the act like a victim note.
I'm not sure why that was done, why anybody felt there was was a need for that to be done.
And I'm not here to defend nor prosecute the O'Reilly County Police Department in the person of Brandon Strickland or anybody else.
In this case, the facts from the wound to the tomb,
from the beginning to the end,
lead conclusively
to the finding that this is a standy ground case.
And that's why, you know, I'll be so glad when we get out of the podcast world with due respect to you and into the courtroom so we can try this case.
For Jennifer, everything rests on that hearing.
That's what the Spiveys are focused on right now.
I'm afraid that
I'm going to continue to be met with walls.
That
I will be stone walled and there will be nothing left that I could do
because they have taken every avenue away from me.
Beyond all the politics and all the questions about legal statutes and immunity, there is a dead man.
And despite all the work Jennifer has done to be her brother's voice in this case, She still doesn't know why he acted the way he did on September 9th, 2023.
It's a question that's dogged my reporting.
Why did Scott Spivey, a man who according to his family wouldn't start a fight, brandish a gun on the highway?
Why did he break check Weldon Boyd?
You know, we won't ever know
what started what happened on September 9th.
I have no idea.
Don't know if we'll ever know.
We know how it ended.
And it just doesn't.
Was Scott a perfect person?
No, we none are.
I mean, we all have our flaws and
we all know that, you know,
that sometimes we reach our limits and things.
But it just was hard for us to think that this was
just a normal day for Scott.
Like this isn't something, this was out of his character.
I don't know.
Just doesn't make sense.
Jennifer says that even if her brother did do something wrong in that moment, he didn't deserve to die.
I see my mama struggle every day with losing her child.
So this isn't just about me advocating for my brother.
I'm advocating for my mama's son.
He was somebody that was loved.
He was somebody, he was a United States citizen who had
the same freedoms and liberties as everybody else.
He deserved to have due process.
My family deserved to have due process.
Have you been able to grieve?
No.
You can't grieve if you're always fighting.
There's no, you can't go through those steps.
The steps don't exist.
And
you're doing nothing but fighting.
There's times I break down because I think.
Especially
at night.
Like, I get out in my car and I look up at the sky and I'm like, I see all the stars up there.
And I'm just, I don't know.
For some reason, it just hits me that
I look up at the stars and I say, baby, I'm so sorry this happened to you.
Why did this have to happen to you?
Why can't people do
the right thing?
It should be the easiest thing you can do.
But for some, it's so hard.
It's
the hardest thing.
Camp Swamp Road is part of the journal, which is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.
I'm Valerie Borline.
Our producer is Heather Rogers.
Our senior producer is Rachel Humphreys.
Editing by Colin McNulty.
Additional reporting in this episode from Mark Miramont.
Special thanks to Catherine Brewer, Miguel Gustillo, Alexandra Citron-Safati, Sam Enriquez, Piago Cari, Carlos Garcia, Maddie Gray, Matt Kwong, Jennifer Levitz, Caroline Light, Josh Locke, Ava Lubell, Corey McConnell, Jessica Mendoza, Annie Menoff, Bruce Orwell, Angela Owens, Filana Patterson, Sarah Platt, Cam Pollack, Griffin Tanner, Nikki Walker, and the entire journal podcast team.
Fact-checking by Nicole Pasolka.
Music, sound design, and mixing by Nathan Singap.
Additional music by Peter Leonard and Alex Rogers Music.
Our theme music is by So Wiley.
Remixed for the series by Nathan Singap.
Thanks for listening and stay tuned.
We plan on following this story over the coming weeks and months.
Keep an eye out for updates in the Wall Street Journal and the Journal Podcast feed.