The Firing Squad Execution of Macall Dan Motti: A Botched Death, a Brutal Crime Spree, and the Questions That Remain
On April 11, 2025, at exactly 6:01 p.m., inside the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, South Carolina, a black hood was placed over a man’s head. Three volunteer corrections officers stood behind a wall, rifles loaded, each one aimed at a small white target pinned directly over the man’s heart. Thirty seconds passed. Then the shots rang out.
The man cried out. His arms flexed. He groaned. For the next eighty seconds the room watched in silence as his chest continued to rise and fall. At 6:05 p.m., a doctor stepped forward and confirmed what the witnesses already knew. Macall Dan Motti was dead. He was 42 years old. He had spent nineteen years on death row for one of the most cold-blooded, calculated murder sprees in South Carolina’s modern history: the ambush killing of an off-duty police captain whose body was then set on fire.
This is the full story of Macall Dan Motti — his fractured childhood, the four-day crime spree that left three people dead across three states, the trial, the years on death row, the choice of the firing squad, and the disturbing autopsy controversy that erupted after the execution was over. It is not a simple story. Stay with it.
A Childhood in Pieces
Macall Dan Motti was born on March 20, 1983, in Virginia. He grew up in Lawrenceville, a small, quiet town where his own life was anything but quiet. His father, who had converted to Islam and taken the name Sharif, came from a broken home himself. Alcoholism ran through the family. Sharif never finished high school, joined the Marines, got out honorably, then at twenty-seven married a sixteen-year-old girl from Richmond. They had two sons: Sem and then Macall.
By 1986, when Macall was just three years old, his mother was gone. She left. His father, struggling and unstable, told the boy she had abandoned him — and later that she had died. The full truth was kept from him entirely. By 1991, when Macall was eight, his father could no longer cope. He split the brothers up. Sem went to an aunt in Texas. Macall was sent to live with a paternal uncle and aunt in Baltimore, Maryland.
There he enrolled at Scots Branch Elementary School. Teachers described him as active and engaged on the surface, but the deeper reports painted a different picture: low self-esteem, difficulty with authority, reading and writing well below grade level, trouble forming real relationships with other children. He dropped out in third grade.
Yet even with that fractured start, by age twenty-one Macall had earned his GED and completed some community college coursework. He had not entirely given up on himself — at least not yet.
In 2001, at eighteen, he attacked a police officer in Virginia. He was convicted and sentenced to ninety-three months in prison plus fifteen years of probation. He was released in May 2004. Two months later, three people were dead.
The Four-Day Crime Spree
What Macall Dan Motti did between July 14 and July 18, 2004, was not a single moment of rage. It was a deliberate, escalating progression across three states.
Sometime on or around July 14, near his home in Brunswick County, Virginia, Motti killed a man during a drug deal that went wrong. He later confessed to the murder, but because of what followed he was never formally tried for it. That killing remained largely unknown to the public for more than two decades and was only confirmed and made public in 2025, the year of his execution. He stole the victim’s gun and car and fled.
July 15, Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Motti walked into a convenience store armed and in need of money. The clerk on duty was twenty-nine-year-old Christopher Jason Bogs — just a regular guy doing his job. While Bogs checked Motti’s ID, Motti pulled the trigger and shot him twice in the head. Bogs died instantly. Motti walked out and kept moving.
July 17, Columbia, South Carolina. Motti carjacked a man at an intersection. Now in a new vehicle, he continued south. He stopped for gas off Interstate 26 in Calhoun County at a property owned by fifty-six-year-old Captain James Meyers of the Orangeburg Department of Public Safety. Meyers was a thirty-year veteran who had started as a firefighter in 1974, worked his way up through quiet leadership, and bought the land just before his fifty-third birthday. He loved the outdoors and had even gotten married on that property less than two years earlier.
On July 18, after spending the day celebrating a birthday with his wife, sister, and daughter, Captain Meyers came home that evening. Motti was waiting in the dark. He had broken into the shed. He ambushed Meyers and shot him nine times — including twice in the head after he had already fallen. Then Motti doused the body in diesel fuel and set it on fire. He stole Meyers’ unmarked police truck, his weapons, and drove south toward Florida.
When Amy Meyers came home, she found her husband’s body in the very shed where they had been married. “I found the love of my life,” she later said in court, “lifeless, lying in a pool of blood.”
The investigation moved fast. Motti tried to use a stolen credit card at a gas station near the farm — the same station where he had abandoned the earlier carjacked vehicle. On July 21, just four days after killing Captain Meyers, he was arrested in Florida — still driving the dead officer’s truck.
After his arrest, Motti wrote a letter: “I’m guilty as hell. What I’ve done is irredeemable.”
Guilty Pleas and a Death Sentence
Extradited to South Carolina, Motti faced charges for the murder of Captain James Meyers. In 2006, just as jury selection was beginning, he surprised the courtroom by pleading guilty. No jury would decide his fate. That responsibility fell to Circuit Judge Clifton Newman — a man who, by his own later admission, opposed capital punishment and took the death penalty extremely seriously.
Judge Newman wrestled with the decision. He told Motti directly: “My challenge and my commitment throughout my judicial career have been to temper justice with mercy and to seek to find the humanity in every defendant that I sentence.” Then he added, “That sense of humanity seems not to exist in Macall Dan Motti.” He sentenced him to death, plus fifteen years for second-degree burglary and ten years for grand larceny, to run consecutively.
At twenty-three, Motti became the youngest person on South Carolina’s death row.
In 2011 he was extradited to North Carolina, pleaded guilty to the murder of Christopher Jason Bogs, and received life without parole. The Virginia killing was never formally charged.
Life on Death Row and the Final Appeals
Motti did not go quietly. During his original sentencing hearing he had smuggled a handmade handcuff key into the courthouse hidden in his mouth. In 2009 he and another inmate stabbed a detention officer, Nathan Sasser, who survived but spoke years later of the lasting damage to his life. Prison records show three attempted escapes and numerous infractions.
His attorneys later described a changed man: an avid reader with a deep interest in history, “a fundamentally different person” from the twenty-one-year-old who committed the crimes. His fifth-grade teacher, Carol Wilson, submitted a statement: “I know there’s good in him. I saw it when he was a boy.” Family members called him quiet, affectionate, thoughtful, and creative. His legal team emphasized they were not minimizing the crimes — only asking the courts to see the man he had become.
The courts were not persuaded. As the execution date neared, lawyers argued that the original sentencing hearing had been inadequate — less than thirty minutes of testimony about Motti’s traumatic childhood — and that years of solitary confinement as a juvenile had altered his developing brain. The South Carolina Supreme Court had rejected similar arguments before. On the morning of April 11, 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to intervene. Governor Henry McMaster denied clemency. No South Carolina governor has granted clemency in any of the forty-seven executions since the death penalty resumed in 1976.
The Execution and the Autopsy That Followed
South Carolina offered three execution methods: lethal injection, electric chair, or firing squad. Motti’s attorney explained the choice: “Faced with barbaric and inhumane choices, Macall Motti has chosen the lesser of three evils.” He picked the firing squad, citing recent problems with lethal injection (including cases where inmates appeared to drown in their own lung fluid) and the grim history of the electric chair.
His last meal was ribeye steak cooked medium, mushroom risotto, broccoli, collard greens, cheesecake, and sweet tea.
On April 11, 2025, nine witnesses sat behind bulletproof glass in the viewing chamber: a member of Captain Meyers’ family, the Calhoun County Sheriff, a representative from the solicitor’s office, and one of Motti’s lawyers. Outside, about twenty-five protesters gathered.
Just before 6:00 p.m. the curtain was pulled back. Motti was already seated in a metal chair fifteen feet from a wall with three small rectangular openings. He never once looked toward the witnesses. At 6:01 p.m. a guard placed the black hood over his head, then crossed the room and lifted the shade over the openings. Thirty seconds passed. The shots rang out.
The white target pinned over his heart was driven inward. Motti cried out loudly. His arms flexed. He groaned again, softer, about forty-five seconds later, then let out a low moan. For roughly eighty seconds his chest continued to rise and fall. One final gasp. A doctor examined him for just over a minute. At 6:05 p.m., Macall Dan Motti was pronounced dead. He gave no final statement.
Then came the unsettling turn.
On May 8, 2025, less than a month later, his attorneys filed an autopsy report with the South Carolina Supreme Court. The execution protocol called for three bullets aimed directly at the heart — three entry wounds, near-instant unconsciousness, rapid death. The autopsy showed only two wounds. Neither bullet had struck the heart directly. Both entered just above the abdomen, shattered into metal splinters, destroyed his liver, damaged his pancreas. His heart kept beating. Forensic pathologists hired by the defense said Motti likely endured “excruciating conscious pain and suffering” for thirty to sixty seconds after the shots.
The state responded that three bullets had struck him and that two had simply passed through the same entry wound. Independent pathologists called that explanation inconsistent with the wound patterns. Motti’s lawyers wrote that “a massive botch is exactly what happened.” They cited a prior South Carolina Supreme Court opinion that had declared firing-squad executions constitutional unless there was a massive botch in which the squad simply missed the heart.
South Carolina’s 2023 shield law protects the identities and training details of the execution team from public view. The exact events behind that wall remain unanswered.
Motti’s execution was only the second time South Carolina had used the firing squad since resuming capital punishment. The first, Brad Sigmon on March 7, 2025, had shown three clear wounds and a completely fragmented heart — swift by comparison. The stark difference has become a flashpoint for death-penalty opponents and legal scholars.
Three Lives That Will Never Be the Same
Captain James Meyers would have been in his late seventies today. Instead his widow found him burned and bleeding in the shed where they had married. His daughter, Meredith Barnett, said before the execution, “I feel at peace about all of it… It’s difficult to talk about taking someone else’s life, but I do feel like that’s justice.”
Christopher Jason Bogs never reached thirty. The unnamed man in Brunswick County, Virginia, is gone too. Three families carry the weight that will never fully lift.
Macall Dan Motti was born into chaos, abandoned young, failed by systems meant to help children like him. At twenty-one he made choices that ended three lives and destroyed countless others. He confessed. He called his crimes irredeemable. A judge said he could find no humanity in him. A fifth-grade teacher insisted the humanity was there. The truth probably lies somewhere in the space between.
And now this: when the state carries out an execution by firing squad — a method chosen precisely because it was supposed to be swift and sure — and an autopsy later suggests the condemned man suffered in ways the protocol was written to prevent, does that change anything? Does it matter how someone dies if we have already decided they deserve to die?
Leave your thoughts in the comments. If you made it this far, thank you for staying with a difficult story. Cases like this force us to look at justice, mercy, and accountability all at once. Until next time.
