A South Carolina Jury Decided That Shooting a Fleeing 14-Year-Old in the Back Wasn't Murder
A South Carolina Jury Decided That Shooting a Fleeing 14-Year-Old in the Back Wasn't MurderTwo weeks ago, a South Carolina jury acquitted the man who chased and shot 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton over water he didn't steal, the latest in a long history of courts failing Black children.
On June 1, 2026, a South Carolina jury found Rick Chow not guilty of murder. Chow, a convenience store owner, had chased a 14-year-old named Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than the length of a football field down a Columbia side street and shot him in the back as he ran away. Chow claimed that Belton had stolen four bottles of water that surveillance footage later showed Carmack-Belton took from a cooler and put back. Carmack-Belton had a pistol on him, but it fell from his pocket during the chase, and the first officer to arrive at the scene testified that Chow admitted he never saw Carmack-Belton point it at anyone. Despite this, the jury concluded that no crime had been committed. The verdict drew protests across Richland County, but the reasoning behind it is not new. American courts have a long record of declining to punish the murder of Black children and of treating those children as threats, rather than as kids.
I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help! With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you. If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers. If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today! The Jury’s VerdictOn May 28, 2023, prosecutor Byron Gipson told the jury that Chow “determined that Cyrus Carmack-Belton’s life was worth less than four bottles of water.” A driver named Laurie Anne Carson, who had stopped at the gas station with her daughter and grandchildren, testified that she watched Carmack-Belton run past looking “frightened and scared,” like a child who “needed help,” with nothing in his hands. The coroner found a single gunshot wound to his lower right back, consistent with someone running away, and no defensive injuries. In an effort to escape from Chow, Carmack-Belton ran so hard he lost his shoes and dropped his phone and backpack as he fled. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said in 2023 that shoplifting water “is not something you shoot anybody over, much less a 14-year-old.”
The defense argued that Chow fired only after Carmack-Belton pointed the gun at Chow’s adult son, a claim that rested almost entirely on the testimony of Chow and his son. Before the trial began, a judge had already found this claim weak enough to bar Chow from using South Carolina’s “stand your ground” law. Chow had shot at suspected shoplifters twice in the previous eight years and was cleared as self-defense both times, and he kept a wall of past shoplifters’ photos above his register. The jury acquitted him anyway. South Carolina Executed a 14-Year-Old in 1944Seventy-nine years before Cyrus Carmack-Belton was killed, the state of South Carolina executed another 14-year-old Black boy named George Stinney Jr. In 1944, in the sawmill town of Alcolu, two white girls were found dead, and Stinney was arrested, interrogated without his parents or a lawyer, and put on trial within about a month. An all-white jury in a county that was nearly three-quarters Black deliberated for roughly ten minutes before convicting him. His court-appointed attorney, according to a later judge’s findings, did almost nothing to defend him. The state executed him by electric chair on June 16, 1944. He weighed about 90 pounds and was so small that officials sat him on a Bible so he would fit in the chair. His feet did not reach the floor.
In 2014, seventy years later, Judge Carmen Mullen vacated his conviction, ruling that the trial had violated his constitutional rights so thoroughly that the verdict could not stand. In America, the courtroom has repeatedly functioned as a place where the killing of a Black child is made legally defensible, whether by condemning the child or by clearing the person who killed him. Decades of Similar VerdictsWhen Emmett Till, who was also 14, was abducted and killed in Mississippi in 1955 after a white woman accused him of grabbing and propositioning her, an all-white jury acquitted the two men responsible after about an hour of deliberation. Months later, protected against retrial by double jeopardy, the men described how they had done it in a paid magazine interview. The woman substantially recanted her accusation decades later.
The same reasoning runs through the modern law of self-defense, which often turns on who is judged to have had a legitimate reason to be afraid. In 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was walking home with candy and a drink when Zimmerman decided he looked suspicious and followed him. Seven years later, three white men in coastal Georgia chased down Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old who was out running, on the theory that he might be a burglar, and one of them shot him. Arbery’s case is the rare exception, because the men were convicted of murder and Georgia repealed the citizen’s-arrest law they had cited to justify the chase. Very little separated that case from Chow’s. Arbery’s killers and Carmack-Belton’s killer did the same thing. They pursued someone they decided was dangerous and shot them, but the legal system decided that one was a murder and the other was a legal act of self-defense. The pattern does not depend on the race of the shooter, and the fact that Chow is a Hong Kong-born immigrant rather than a white Southerner does not change it. What matters is who is treated as the threat. Ask yourself, if Carmack-Belton had been white and the man chasing him Black, would the outcome have been the same? Black Boys Are Labeled as ThreatsThere is research that proves the mechanism behind these outcome disparities. In a 2014 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff and his colleagues found that beginning around age 10, Black boys are no longer granted the presumption of innocence extended to other children. Participants overestimated the boys’ ages by an average of 4.5 years and judged them more responsible for alleged crimes, and police officers who scored higher on measures of dehumanization were more likely to have used force against the Black children in their custody. 14-year-old Black boys are perceived as adults who should know better. That perception shapes whose fear the legal system sees as valid. In 2021, a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who carried an AR-15-style rifle across state lines into a protest and shot three people, killing two, on the grounds that he reasonably feared for his life. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was three years younger than Rittenhouse. He ran until he lost his shoes, his phone, and his backpack, and his fear was treated as aggression. The armed white teenager received the benefit of the doubt that the fleeing Black child did not.
In Chow’s trial, the defense described Carmack-Belton as someone “roaming the streets” with a loaded “semiautomatic pistol.” They used the same tactics that portrayed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old shot by Cleveland police within roughly two seconds of their arrival in 2014 while holding a toy gun in a park, as an adult threat. No officer was ever charged in Rice’s case. Why Don’t We Protect Black Children?Every system built for an emergency starts from the same rule: get the children out first. It’s the principle behind “women and children first” at sea, and it is still how firefighters, disaster crews, and rescue teams set their priorities. We teach it as a basic measure of a functioning society. The reasoning is simple. A child cannot be expected to protect himself and has not had the chance to grow up, so the adults around them take on the risk first.
However, much of America does not follow this rule when it comes to Black children. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14 years old. An armed adult chased him down the street and killed him, and instead of protecting him, a jury found his murderer not guilty. Childhood is supposed to be the reason we protect a kid first and ask questions later. For black boys, the questions come first, and the protection too often never comes at all. George Stinney, Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, and now Cyrus Carmack-Belton were all children before they were anything a court or a shooter decided to call them, and the refusal to see them that way is what keeps getting them killed. 🚨🚨🚨WAIT🚨🚨🚨Before you go, help preserve this history of atrocities committed against People of Color!If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support. So many of you have subscribed to this newsletter.But less than 5% of you are paid, supporters.That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely. This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.
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