Christine Anne Chestnut-Hayes, a 47-year-old white woman, left behind family, friends, and a community that knew her simply as Christine, a Blythewood and Columbia-area resident whose obituary later recorded her birth on July 17, 1972 and her death on October 3, 2019. She was remembered in funeral notices from Myers Mortuary in Columbia and on memorial pages that marked the date without immediately explaining the violence behind it, only that she had died in Columbia, South Carolina, at the age
of 47.
On the night of the shooting, deputies were called around 10:30–10:40 p.m. to Ballenton Road, a residential stretch in northeast Richland County off Hardscrabble Road near I-77. When officers arrived, they found a chaotic, intimate scene: according to reports, Christine lay face down in the yard of a home, mortally wounded, while 24-year-old Justin Glenn was slumped over in a nearby vehicle. A third man from Blythewood, later identified as John Dickerson in court records, was discovered in the backyard, injured but conscious and unable to move. Both Christine and Justin had been shot in the upper torso, and the county coroner would later confirm that they died of gunshot wounds at the scene. The surviving victim was rushed to a local hospital.
In the early days after the attack, the community only knew that two people had been killed and one badly hurt in what sheriff’s officials described as a deadly eruption of gunfire on Ballenton Road. As investigators pieced together what had happened, they focused on a man named Demetrick Doctor. By the first week after the shooting, the Richland County Sheriff’s Department publicly identified him as the suspect they believed was responsible for the double homicide and the wounding of the third victim. A local television station reported that deputies believed he had opened fire on three people that Thursday night, killing Christine and Justin and leaving the third man gravely injured, and that he was considered armed and dangerous.
Within days, officers with the Richland County Sheriff’s Department Fugitive Task Force and the U.S. Marshals Service tracked Doctor down. He was arrested on October 5 and taken into custody without incident before being transported to the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Columbia. Authorities announced that he was being charged with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder, and that investigators were seeking his brother, Christopher Doctor, for questioning about the case. In interviews with local media, Sheriff Leon Lott did not mince words, calling Doctor “evil,” emphasizing that he and other members of his family were already well known to law enforcement, and noting that Doctor had previously served around twenty years for a manslaughter conviction before being released in 2015.
As more details emerged, a grim narrative took shape about the motive behind the violence. Investigators told reporters that on the night before the shooting, Doctor had a confrontation with Justin Glenn that stemmed from a dispute over drugs. They said that in the day or two that followed, Doctor came to believe that threats had been made, and that the gunfire on Ballenton Road was an act of retaliation for that earlier conflict. At a press conference, Sheriff Lott described the attack as a demonstration of “total disregard for human life,” stressing that Christine and the third victim had not been involved in the drug dispute at all but were simply present when the ambush unfolded.
The full scope of what happened to Christine that night was laid out in more detail when the case finally went to trial in April 2022. According to a summary from the Fifth Circuit Solicitor’s Office, jurors heard testimony that on the evening of October 2, 2019, Doctor had the initial encounter with Justin Glenn. The following day, he drove back to the same location on Ballenton Road, got out of his car, and launched an ambush on the people gathered there: Justin, Christine, and John Dickerson. Witnesses and evidence presented in court showed that he fired all around the property using two different shotguns and a pistol. Justin and Christine were each struck by shotgun blasts that proved fatal. John Dickerson survived but was shot in the face; the injuries left him permanently blind, a living reminder of the devastation wrought in those few violent moments. After the shooting, Doctor fled the scene, only to be caught by deputies two days later.
In April 2022, more than two and a half years after the night that claimed Christine’s life, a Richland County jury returned its verdict. Doctor, then 49 years old, was found guilty of two counts of murder for the deaths of Christine and Justin, and one count of attempted murder for the attack on John Dickerson. The judge, Jocelyn Newman, sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, ensuring that he would spend the rest of his life in prison. For Christine’s family and the broader community, the sentence marked a legal conclusion but not an emotional resolution; memorial pages continued to collect tributes to her, and local coverage of the trial emphasized the lasting impact of the crime on both the victims’ loved ones and the surviving victim, who must live with permanent, life-altering injuries.
Even after sentencing, the case did not disappear entirely from the courts. In 2025, Doctor appealed his convictions and sentences, arguing that the trial court should have suppressed a recording of his police interrogation and raising other issues with how the questioning was handled. The South Carolina Court of Appeals, in an unpublished opinion, rejected his arguments and affirmed his convictions and concurrent life-without-parole sentences. With that decision, the legal system effectively closed the door on his challenge, leaving the original jury verdict and sentence in place while the memory of Christine Anne Chestnut-Hayes continues to live on in the records of the courts, the pages of local newspapers, and the words left for her on online memorials.
