Get MACED - The Bodycam Footage That ENDED His Career

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00:00:28.000 This is the docket. Tonight, it's here at home in Horry County, South Carolina, my home state.

00:00:36.380 One rule before we start, I need you to hold me to it. You're going to hear the word

00:00:39.860 alleges over and over again in this segment. That word is doing real work. This case has

00:00:46.760 not been adjudicated yet in any civil court. And so we're using the word alleged, okay,

00:00:55.080 because none of it, some of what I'm about to show you

00:00:57.020 is documented on video, yes, and audio.

00:01:00.020 Some of it is accusation in a lawsuit

00:01:01.980 that no judge and no jury has tested yet.

00:01:04.980 And I will tell you which is which every single time.

00:01:07.320 That's my promise to you.

00:01:08.800 But on September 9th, 2023,

00:01:11.180 a man named Scott Spivey was 33 years old,

00:01:13.800 an insurance adjuster,

00:01:14.820 and was driving his truck up Highway 9 headed home.

00:01:17.420 And I'm gonna give you the whole record,

00:01:19.260 including the parts his family

00:01:20.240 probably doesn't wish were true

00:01:21.740 because you deserve all of it

00:01:23.720 before you sit in judgment of this case.

00:01:26.400 And this story doesn't need either side sanitized, okay?

00:01:29.660 Witnesses that day reported erratic driving.

00:01:32.040 More than one said he displayed a handgun.

00:01:35.080 His blood alcohol was later reported at 0.13,

00:01:38.240 and we need to go there

00:01:39.300 because there needs to be a real debate

00:01:40.920 on how his alcohol levels were tested, by the way,

00:01:44.320 because that matters here.

00:01:45.980 They weren't tested right away.

00:01:48.340 His body was still left in a truck

00:01:50.260 driven 25 miles away,

00:01:52.720 and I'm told was in a condition that could have exacerbated the alcohol level

00:01:58.060 because of how long they waited and the condition of the body when they waited.

00:02:02.220 And those facts are central to the original ruling that this was self-defense.

00:02:07.520 And they're real.

00:02:09.500 Here's what else is real.

00:02:10.900 Arrest on an owner named Weldon Boyd with a passenger whose last name is Williams

00:02:15.200 followed Scott Spivey for roughly nine miles.

00:02:18.480 Evidence later presented in court put speeds above 100 miles an hour.

00:02:22.820 Boyd called 911 himself, and on that call, he told the dispatcher that if Spivey aimed

00:02:27.400 a gun again, quote, we're going to have to shoot him. 0.99

00:02:31.940 We're going to have to shoot him, he told the 911 dispatcher. 1.00

00:02:38.040 Spivey turned right onto Camp Swamp Road, the road toward his own house. 0.80

00:02:42.840 Boyd's stated destination was straight ahead.

00:02:45.680 Boyd decided to turn right and follow Spivey.

00:02:47.600 minutes later scott spivey was dead and boyd and williams had both fired allegedly neither of them

00:02:52.680 had a scratch both said were self-defense neither man has ever been charged with a crime and both

00:02:57.240 maintained that to this day they acted lawfully who fired first is genuinely disputed and what

00:03:02.780 the docket is about tonight is what police did next by two in the morning the lead detective's

00:03:07.440 initial report already described the shooting as appearing justified and then piece by piece over

00:03:12.180 three years. Over the last three years, their frame fell apart. Fact one documented on body

00:03:17.960 camera. Sergeant at the scene, Damon Biscoe, wrote five words on a yellow legal pad and held it up

00:03:23.980 for Boyd and Williams to see. The words were act like a victim camera. He checked whether another

00:03:29.880 officer's camera was running first. He angled his own away. His own body camera caught the note

00:03:34.800 anyway. Let's put it on the screen. Let people read it. An independent journalist named Beth

00:03:39.580 Brayden found that moment buried in hours of footage almost two years later. The department

00:03:44.800 later fired Viscovi for policy violations. Boyd, for his part, has said he didn't know the officer,

00:03:51.360 wishes he had never been shown the note, and thinks the officer may have been trying to calm

00:03:55.100 him down. I wish he had never done that. Was it a surprise to you that some officer you don't know

00:04:01.280 showed you this note? I didn't know what he meant, but I was totally dumbfounded by it.

00:04:07.660 i mean what do you what do you say to that what do you do to that act like a victim

00:04:11.180 i mean i i am a victim i i'm sitting here at a scene where someone just tried to shoot me and

00:04:17.280 we had to shoot back and you walk up and you just flash that at me and then i i mean immediately i

00:04:23.940 knew this was bad because i didn't ask for that that is his answer and now you have it

00:04:32.640 let's put it on screen again for the people to read let's see that

00:04:36.840 and hats off to beth braden with true sunlight podcast for finding that

00:04:42.980 fact two documented scott spivey's truck was towed roughly 25 miles to a county facility

00:04:48.540 with his body still inside it a crime scene investigator testified she'd never seen that

00:04:53.840 in her six years on the job former south carolina coroners told the wall street journal it was not

00:04:59.200 normal practice to do that, and the county's explanation was that rain threatened the evidence.

00:05:04.580 His parents say they later had to watch video of their son's body being thrown around inside that

00:05:09.060 truck as it was unloaded. Their lawsuit says officers on camera discussed making sure the

00:05:14.220 family was never told his body had been moved that way. That last part is an allegation, and it's one

00:05:20.360 that I can't get out of my head. Fact three documented, and this is the part that turned

00:05:26.460 a bad investigation into a

00:05:28.540 scandal. Weldon Boyd's

00:05:30.580 phone automatically recorded his

00:05:32.400 own calls. Man, I wish I had that app on

00:05:34.480 my phone. I'd like to know what it was.

00:05:36.480 About 90 of those recordings ended up in

00:05:38.440 a police file

00:05:40.480 that Scott's sister obtained by subpoena.

00:05:42.380 She opened them at her kitchen table one

00:05:44.500 day, and on those recordings is the deputy chief

00:05:46.440 of police, Brandon Strickland, a personal

00:05:48.340 friend of Boyd, the shooter

00:05:50.400 in his own voice, while his department

00:05:52.620 investigated his friend

00:05:54.500 for a killing.

00:05:56.460 I got the people coming that I need to come, he said, working, quote, in the shadows, in the

00:06:02.860 shadows. The detective is, quote, a good old boy. You were, quote, taken care of, predicting on tape

00:06:08.520 that the case would be closed by, quote, the end of the week easily, unless they ran extra weapon

00:06:13.560 testing to determine, and this is word for word, who won the prize of killing Scott Spivey. The

00:06:19.220 prize, that's what they called him. And then this about the man his friend had just shot. I'm just

00:06:24.240 glad it was a white guy. Brandon, where are you at? Can you come to Camp Swamp Road off of 9 0.63

00:06:32.560 like as fast as possible? I had to shoot somebody. This was the phone call restaurant owner Weldon 0.93

00:06:39.160 Boyd made to former Horry County Deputy Chief Brandon Strickland following a deadly shootout

00:06:44.340 between Boyd and Scott Spivey. It happened on September 9, 2023, while the two traveled

00:06:49.360 separately on Highway 9, then turned on a Camp Swamp Road. The incident was

00:06:54.100 ruled self-defense and Boyd was never charged. And the detective who met with

00:06:58.920 you last night was Alan Jones, right? I think so, yeah. Yeah, country guy, good old

00:07:04.640 good old boy. Well, that's who I sent out there and I called the captain over

00:07:08.520 investigation and told me that you were. And my next call was to Jamie Richardson.

00:07:13.380 Strickland does tell Boyd in the calls to talk to his attorney and though he

00:07:17.440 couldn't be there physically i was in the shadows last night i weren't there but i was in the

00:07:22.100 shadows you were you were taken care of surprise end of the week easily glad it was a white guy

00:07:29.400 sit with those words for a minute a deputy chief of police calling a dead man a prize and relieved

00:07:35.540 about the victim's race because he knew the scrutiny would have been far worse had it been

00:07:40.680 a black man he said all of it out loud because he was certain no one would ever hear it he didn't

00:07:45.060 know he was being recorded. Strickland sighed because this show gives you both. His lawyer

00:07:49.580 says those statements were bluster, that he recused himself, never went to the scene and

00:07:54.800 influenced nothing. The department has said the detective was already up on the on-call rotation.

00:08:00.220 Strickland left the department as scrutiny intensified. And after the new lawsuit was

00:08:05.440 filed this week, his lawyer called it inflammatory rubbish and said the officers will be vindicated

00:08:09.820 in court that may be that's what courts are for which brings us to this week on september 8th

00:08:15.740 three years to the week after the shooting scott spivey's family filed a federal civil rights

00:08:20.160 lawsuit in florence in south carolina 14 defendants the county the former chief the former deputy

00:08:25.640 chief and 11 more officers and supervisors boyd and williams are not defendants in this case the

00:08:31.040 lawsuit is aimed entirely at the local government in south carolina the lawsuit alleges widespread

00:08:37.300 INTENTIONAL MISHANDLING OF THE

00:08:39.440 INVESTIGATION INTO SPIVEY'S DEATH 0.84

00:08:41.400 STARTING JUST MINUTES AFTER THE 0.82

00:08:43.440 SHOOTING AND GOING THROUGH THIS

00:08:44.840 YEAR.

00:08:45.540 THE SPIVEY FAMILY HOPES WHEN THE 0.68

00:08:47.140 LAWSUIT IS DONE IT CAUSES 0.91

00:08:48.940 WIDESPREAD CHANGE IN POLICING

00:08:50.780 HERE IN HOREY COUNTY.

00:08:52.420 THE LAWSUIT MAKES MORE THAN 50

00:08:54.680 ALLEGATIONS OF QUOTE COORDINATED

00:08:57.120 MISUSE OF LAW ENFORCEMENT

00:08:58.860 AUTHORITY, SPECIFICALLY NAMING

00:09:00.620 13 OFFICERS.

00:09:02.700 OF THOSE 13, WE'VE CONFIRMED 10

00:09:05.020 STILL WORK AT HCPD.

00:09:06.820 Two of the officers even testified at this year's Stand Your Ground hearings for Weldon Boyd and Kenneth Williams.

00:09:13.240 The allegations include mishandling evidence at the scene of the shooting, officers failing to separate witnesses upon arrival, and turning off their body-worn cameras.

00:09:23.740 The complaint alleges, and every single word of this next part is an allegation,

00:09:29.180 that commanders held a meeting two days after the shooting and set the direction of the investigation,

00:09:33.680 that officers were told to be nice to Boyd and Williams, that cameras were deliberately

00:09:38.020 shut off, that phones and a tablet that may have recorded the shooting were left in the

00:09:42.880 shooter's hands instead of being seized under a warrant.

00:09:45.980 He did ask you to delete Facebook messages, right?

00:09:48.740 He did.

00:09:51.100 And based on his instruction, you did that, correct?

00:09:54.020 I did.

00:09:57.200 The tablet was in the truck at night of the incident, right?

00:10:00.240 it was mounted on the dash um about right here

00:10:06.400 okay and indeed some of the photos you can see right you can see it yes sir and so you don't

00:10:11.600 dispute there was a tablet on the dash and it could have been capturing images or film if it

00:10:17.760 were programmed to do so right um yeah if you wanted to use it for that purpose it can be used

00:10:23.120 for that purpose that bar surveillance footage was selectively cut to make spivey look worse

00:10:28.960 that evidence was mislabeled so it could not be found,

00:10:31.700 that the crime scene log went missing for two years,

00:10:35.220 that pills were planted in Spivey's truck through an unsealed rear window,

00:10:39.140 and that his body was left in the heat in a way that inflated the toxicology report.

00:10:43.580 On the pills, the heat, and the tablet, I want to be straight with you,

00:10:46.040 no public forensic finding establishes any of those three.

00:10:50.000 They are claims, they are allegations, and discovery exists to test those claims,

00:10:54.080 and now for the first time there will be discovery to test them.

00:10:57.400 Two things have already been decided by a judge, so you know this is not just a family's theory.

00:11:01.820 In February, after a four-day hearing, a judge denied Boyd and Williams' immunity from the family's wrongful death suit

00:11:08.080 and said, on the record, that he questioned Boyd's credibility.

00:11:12.220 He also weighed evidence that Williams deleted Facebook messages at Boyd's request and gave police false information.

00:11:19.820 Denial of immunity is not a finding of guilt.

00:11:22.240 The wrongful death case is simply allowed to proceed, and it is.

00:11:25.580 On the criminal side, the attorney general has referred the police conduct to an outside solicitor and a state grand jury was impaneled in February.

00:11:33.980 Grand juries are secret. There's no public result yet, but it's a case you need to be closely watching.

00:11:40.740 Why am I giving this case a full segment?

00:11:44.800 Because I have publicly demanded answers for this family before tonight and because every piece of it was almost never found.

00:11:52.060 Think about the chain. The note was caught by an independent journalist re-watching body camera

00:11:57.400 footage. The calls exist because a private citizen's phone happened to record them.

00:12:01.900 The file came out because a sister spent her Super Bowl Sunday alone at a kitchen table with

00:12:06.760 a flash drive. Take away any link in that chain and this case is still closed and the official

00:12:14.440 story is still the only story. A civilized state can't hide the truth and body camera laws mean

00:12:20.480 nothing if officers can turn those cameras off at the exact moments that it matters.

00:12:25.140 Officer-involved shootings should go to an outside agency by default, not by referral.

00:12:29.720 Two years later, an evidence standards need teeth because a chain of custody that includes a private

00:12:33.800 garage and an unsealed rear window is not a chain of custody at all. These are policy fights worth

00:12:40.880 having, and the county says it doesn't comment on pending litigation. A spokesperson for Horry

00:12:45.580 County did not provide us with a comment on the allegations. Most of the named officers have not

00:12:51.220 yet responded in court and their silence is no admission. Service runs through December and we're

00:12:56.040 going to follow the docket every single day and when the defendants answer you'll hear the answers

00:13:00.700 in full. Scott Spivey was not a perfect man on September 9th, 2023. Nobody, nobody in this story

00:13:07.640 was. He was a citizen of South Carolina who deserved to live though and three years later

00:13:12.720 the question is no longer only who fired first the question is whether the people we pay to find

00:13:17.980 out who fired first ever tried and that's the docket this is the show weeknights monday through

00:13:26.440 thursday at 8 p.m i'm in session this week so we went along we went long tonight and we'll cut the

00:13:31.980 program and re-air it each night segment by segment every segment you just watched goes up on its own

00:13:37.260 on a different day i'll cut it down just for your evening before you go to bed at night i'm an

00:13:42.580 early i go to bed early don't tell anybody but um but i i'm an early i early i'm early to rise too

00:13:48.860 so tell a friend who thinks congress is boring it's not boring and good night actually not good

00:13:56.120 night one more thing because i promised you at the top every claim in tonight's show has a source

00:14:00.500 and we publish the whole fact table with the episode you'll see it in the description and

00:14:05.720 in the comments the complaint the court record the clips the numbers all of it linked if somebody

00:14:10.840 tells you we got something wrong ask them for their sources because we will show you ours keep

00:14:16.740 your receipts we keep ours good night for real this time I see you're not following me hit the

00:14:22.460 follow button now

Get MACED - September 18, 2026

The Bodycam Footage That ENDED His Career

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