Xavier Moultrie, a 28-year-old man from Moncks Corner, South Carolina, grew up in the Lowcountry surrounded by family, school friends, and the games he loved. Born on September 5, 1991, in Charleston, he was the son of Mark A. Crawford and Mary Moultrie Jackson and carried both surnames as Xavier Moultrie-Crawford. Family and friends called him “X,” a nickname that followed him from his days at Cane Bay High School in Summerville into adulthood.
He was known as a hard worker and a construction worker by trade, someone who spent his days on job sites and his free time immersed in sports, especially basketball and football, and in weightlifting. Those closest to him remembered a loyal, competitive young man with a quick sense of humor who could light up a room and make others smile, and he was also a father, survived by a young daughter named Bailey as well as his parents, siblings, and extended family.
In the early hours of Sunday, July 28, 2019, the quiet of Sweet Bay Lane in Moncks Corner was shattered by gunfire. Around 4:40 a.m., Berkeley County deputies and the coroner’s office were called to the residential street after reports of a shooting. When they arrived, they found Xavier lying on the ground with at least one gunshot wound. Despite the efforts of first responders, he was pronounced dead at the scene. The coroner’s office formally identified him and listed his cause of death as a gunshot wound, transforming what had been an ordinary summer night into a homicide investigation that reverberated through his family and neighborhood. In the immediate aftermath, officials could offer little to the public beyond confirmation of his identity and the fact that the case was being treated as a murder; early reports noted that authorities had not yet named a suspect or announced any arrests.
As days turned into weeks, investigators from the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office worked behind the scenes to trace what had happened on Sweet Bay Lane before that 4:40 a.m. call. Over the course of their investigation, they came to focus on a local man, Johntay Omar Weathers, as the person they believed had pulled the trigger. When they went public with his name, deputies described him as armed and extremely dangerous and urged the community to come forward with any information about his whereabouts. Arrest warrants were obtained charging him with murder in Xavier’s killing, use of a weapon during a violent crime, and possession of a firearm by someone prohibited from having one. The announcement painted a picture of a suspect already known to law enforcement; court and booking records show that years earlier, in 2015, Weathers had been arrested in Berkeley County on a serious drug manufacturing and distribution charge, though, as with any such record, that prior case was only an allegation and not proof of guilt.
For months, posters and news reports repeated Weathers’ name as deputies searched for him, warning residents that the suspect in Xavier’s killing might still be moving through the same communities that were mourning the loss. The break came in November 2019, when U.S. Marshals and North Charleston Police officers located and arrested him on the outstanding Berkeley County murder warrant. According to local coverage at the time, he was taken into custody and transported to the Hill-Finklea Detention Center, where he was held while awaiting a bond hearing scheduled for November 23, 2019. Authorities reiterated that he was wanted specifically in connection with the shooting that claimed Xavier’s life on Sweet Bay Lane that July morning. The arrest marked a turning point for Xavier’s family and friends, offering at least the hope that the case would move into the courts and that there might one day be a public accounting of what led to the deadly encounter.
Publicly available records and news accounts, however, do not clearly trace what happened to the murder case against Weathers after his arrest. There is no widely reported trial or conviction in connection with Xavier’s death in the years that followed, at least in the sources that remain accessible. Instead, a grim twist emerged in 2021: on April 23 of that year, deputies were called to a Berkeley County hospital after a man arrived seeking treatment for a gunshot wound and was later pronounced dead. The coroner identified the new victim as 28-year-old Johntay Omar Weathers of Moncks Corner. Subsequent statements from the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office and local news reports in 2021 and 2024 explained that detectives believed the shooting that killed him had occurred in the Longbridge area of the county and that his own homicide remained unsolved, with investigators again asking the public to help fill in the gaps.
While investigators pursued leads, Xavier’s loved ones created their own forms of remembrance. Obituary notices and memorial pages filled with condolences spoke of a son, brother, and father taken too soon, and online tributes invited people to light virtual candles in his name, share photographs, and write down memories of his smile and the way he made others feel included. Community members described a young man who enjoyed music and sports, who had walked the halls of local schools and worked on local construction crews, and whose absence left an empty space at family gatherings and in neighborhood circles. At his funeral services and burial in early August 2019, relatives and friends gathered to say goodbye, even as the story of how and why he died continued to unfold slowly through police updates and court records. Taken together, the scattered reports, warrants, and obituaries sketch a story of a promising life ended on a quiet street before dawn, a long manhunt for a named suspect, and then another violent death that deepened the tragedy and left both families and the wider Moncks Corner community with unanswered questions about justice and what might have prevented so much loss. 14
