Detrick Gibbons, 36, a man, had grown up with roots in Florence and family who remembered him by the nickname “Dolford,” a life marked by local schools and working jobs that kept him moving through the everyday rhythms of the Pee Dee. In the earliest hours of Friday, September 11, 2020, that ordinary world was interrupted at a roadside hotel in Florence County, at the crossroads of Highway 76 and Interstate 95. Deputies were called to the Florence Inn & Suites around 5:15 a.m.
and found Gibbons wounded by gunfire inside. He was rushed to a nearby hospital, but the coroner, Keith Von Lutcken, later identified him as the victim and said he was pronounced dead after arriving there.
What happened in those moments at the hotel was, at least publicly, described in fragments: a response before dawn, a wounded man, and investigators trying to reconstruct the chain of events. Florence County Sheriff Billy Barnes said his office was still gathering information about what led to the shooting and who was involved, signaling a case that had not, at that time, settled into a clear public narrative about a shooter or motive. The hotel itself—also described as being on Bancroft Road—became the fixed point, the place investigators returned to as they chased down leads and tried to determine how the violence unfolded.
As the investigation moved forward, at least one person was publicly connected to the case through the court system. Markquell Moore was charged in connection with Gibbons’ death as an accessory after the fact of murder, with allegations that he and others helped in ways that obscured what happened—moving or concealing evidence, failing to notify law enforcement, or failing to render aid. Court reporting also noted that Moore was released from the Florence County Detention Center on March 2, 2021, on a $15,000 surety bond.
Years later, the case surfaced again in public view not through a trial, but through a reversal in the status of that accessory charge. Reporting tied to the Florence County Clerk of Court’s Office said the accessory-after-the-fact charge against Moore was dismissed in January. In the publicly available reporting found here, no additional suspect is named as the shooter, and no murder conviction or completed murder trial is described in connection with Gibbons’ killing—leaving the story, for outsiders looking in, defined by the stark early-morning shooting and the later rise and fall of an accessory case rather than a publicly documented resolution identifying who pulled the trigger.
