We have the usual suspects, aspiring rappers and gang members turning their lives around. Update to this story.
Days before Christmas 2012, Keith Alextruss Williams showed up at the Game Room, a Ladson nightclub. Deputies knew him to have ties to “Town of Lincolnville,” or TOL, a local gang.
He partied alongside Nathaniel Nelson Green, a rap singer from the town. Officers knew of Green, too. He had done prison time for shooting someone amid a crowd at a Thanksgiving parade in Mount Pleasant.
At some point, a fight broke out at the Game Room. Williams drew a pistol, deputies said, and fired 14 times. Someone fired back, hitting Green in the hip.
After Green recovered and Williams posted bail, the two got together again a week ago in Myrtle Beach. They went there to party May 24 during Atlantic Beach Bikefest.
But that night, they found themselves in another brawl. Gunshots resounded, and Williams went down.
Green ran to the Bermuda Sands Motel. A gunman followed and unleashed another volley, missing Green but hitting three other friends from the Summerville area.
When it ended, Jamie Alexander Williams, 28, Devonte Herman Dantzler, 21, and Sandy Geddis Barnwell, 22, were dead, and Keith Williams clung to life at a hospital.
Myrtle Beach police investigators have labeled the shooting a result of possible gang activity, but a spokesman stopped short of naming any group that the Summerville-area residents might have encountered that Saturday night. An alleged shooter has not been arrested.
But the Lincolnville group is one of several street gangs that have caught the interest of local law agencies. The FBI indicated in 2011 that 33,000 of them have proliferated nationwide.
All of the young men who were shot have been accused of being on one side of a gun or the other in the past, and Charleston County Sheriff’s Office Maj. Eric Watson said deputies were working with Myrtle Beach police officers to look at their backgrounds for clues in the shooting.
“Most of the activity involved with these groups is criminal activity – weapons, drugs – that tends to promote violence,” Watson said. “Mostly, they fight over turf.”