COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A South Carolina inmate who killed a man, burned his eyes with cigarettes and then painted “catch me if u can” on the wall with the victim’s blood more than 20 years ago has been scheduled to be executed next month.
The state Supreme Court issued the death warrant Friday for Stephen Bryant, 44. The court denied a request from Bryant’s lawyers, who asked for a delay because they work with the federal court system and the U.S. government is shut down.
While Bryant is being put to death Nov. 14 for one killing, prosecutors said he also shot and killed two other men he was giving rides to as they were reliving themselves on the side of the road during a few weeks that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.
Bryant will be the 50th person executed in South Carolina since the state restarted the death penalty in 1985 and the seventh inmate put to death in less than 14 months since the state was able to obtain a drug for lethal injection and reopen the death chamber after an unintentional 13-year pause.
Bryant will have until Oct. 31 to choose if he wants to die by lethal injection, firing squad or in the electric chair. Since the long pause, four inmates have chosen lethal injection and two have died by bullets.
A total of 38 men have been executed so far this year in the U.S., with an inmate scheduled to die Friday by lethal injection in Arizona. At least five other executions are set in the U.S. during the rest of 2025.
Taunts written in blood on the wall
Bryant admitted to killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen after stopping by his secluded home in rural Sumter County and saying he had car trouble.
Tietjen was shot several times. Candles were lit around his body. Someone took a potholder made by his daughter when she was child, dipped the corner in blood and wrote “victem 4 in 2 weeks. catch me if u can” on the wall, authorities said.
Tietjen’s daughter called him several times, getting more worried when he didn’t answer. On the sixth call, she testified a strange voice answered.
The person on the other end told her she had the right number. Then she demanded to speak to her father.
“And he said ‘you can’t, I killed him.’ And I said, ‘this isn’t funny, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler. And I said, ‘excuse me, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler,” Kimberly Dees testified before a judge who determined Bryant’s sentence.
More killings terrorize a South Carolina county
Prosecutors said Bryant also killed two men — one before and one after Tietjen. He gave the men rides and when they got out to urinate on the side of lonely, rural roads he shot them in the back.
As deputies frantically looked for the killer, many of the 100,000 people in Sumter County lived in fear over the random attacks. Officers stopped nearly everyone driving on dirt roads and told people to be leery of anyone they did not know asking for help.
Bryant used drugs to blunt pain from alleged sex abuse
Bryant’s lawyers said he was troubled in the months before the killing, begging a probation agent and his aunt to get him help because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by four male relatives when he was a child.
“He was very upset. He looked like he was being tortured. It’s like his soul was just laid wide open. In his eyes you could see he was hurting and suffering and he was living the abuse over again as it was coming out,” aunt Terry Caulder testified.
Bryant tried to help himself through the pain by using meth and smoking joints he sprayed with bug killer, his defense attorneys said.
Previous inmates executed have said methods are cruel
The six inmates executed in South Carolina since September 2024 have argued the state’s methods are cruel and unusual punishments, but have not been able to stop their deaths.
With the firing squad, attorneys for the inmates say the three volunteers with rifles nearly missed the heart of the second man killed, Mikal Mahdi. They suggested Mahdi was in agonizing pain for three or four times longer than experts say he would have been if his heart had been hit directly.
Condemned inmates have also scrutinized the lethal injection procedures, which appear to now use two doses of the powerful sedative pentobarbital. They said inmates drown in a rush of fluid into their lungs but are paralyzed and cannot react.
Witnesses to the four executions have not seen any signs of struggle and report the prisoners appear to have lost consciousness in about a minute.
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