Perla Azucena Banuelos-Allende was a 5-year-old girl living with her parents and siblings in a small home on Lester Road in Dillon County, South Carolina, when her life was cut short in the early hours of Saturday, February 3, 2018. She had been born on March 29, 2012, in Orange County, North Carolina, to Manuel Banuelos Estrada and Martha Allende Perez, and was the youngest of several children.
Her family had strong ties to Siler City, North Carolina, where she would later be laid to rest after her death at McLeod Medical Center in Dillon on that same February morning.
In the darkness just after 2:00 a.m., deputies, EMS, and rescue crews were dispatched to reports of gunfire on Lester Road. According to investigators, a party in the neighborhood had spiraled into violence, with someone firing a gun as people scattered. Three people were shot in the chaos; among them was Perla, who had been asleep in her bed when a bullet tore through the wall of her home and struck her in the side and stomach. Her home, where three other children under the age of twelve were also sleeping, suddenly became a crime scene.
Inside the house, her parents found her bleeding badly, and the panic in the home spilled into the street. Family members called 911, ran outside to flag down help, and waited for EMS to arrive. Neighbors rushed over; two women came to the house, and one of them performed CPR on the tiny girl as they tried desperately to keep her alive until paramedics arrived. Recordings of the 911 calls later released by local media captured the terror in the voices of callers pleading for help, crying out that a baby had been shot. Paramedics managed to revive Perla briefly, shocking her at the scene, and rushed her to McLeod Medical Center in Dillon. She never made it to surgery and was pronounced dead at the hospital. The Dillon County coroner ruled her death a homicide.
In the days that followed, the details of what had happened emerged slowly. The Dillon County Sheriff’s Office and Dillon County Coroner’s Office treated the shooting as a homicide from the outset, and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division’s crime scene unit was called in to help process the scene. Investigators said the shooting began at a party in the neighborhood, and relatives described a man firing a gun “everywhere” as people fled toward nearby houses, one of the rounds crossing the street and punching through the wall of Perla’s bedroom. Three victims in total were taken from Lester Road to McLeod Medical Center; only the child did not survive.
Perla’s family had only recently moved to the neighborhood, a fact that neighbors would later mention with a kind of stunned regret. One neighbor, who remembered waking up to loud music between 2:00 and 3:00 a.m. but not hearing gunfire, recalled walking outside later that morning to find the yard filled with deputies and realizing something terrible had happened. Relatives said the family was so overwhelmed with grief after the killing in their new home that they left town altogether. At the same time, a GoFundMe campaign organized from Siler City shared a bilingual plea from Perla’s mother, describing how her world “turned upside down” when her youngest daughter was hit by a bullet while sleeping in her bed, and asking for help with funeral expenses during what she called the hardest time of her life.
While the family prepared for her funeral Mass at St. Julia Catholic Parish in Siler City and her burial at Chatham Memorial Park, investigators worked to identify who had fired the fatal shot. Days after the shooting, authorities announced that Lakeisha Shanae Martin, a 24-year-old woman from Latta, had been charged with attempted murder for shooting one of the adult victims during the same incident on Lester Road. Officials were careful to emphasize that she was not charged in Perla’s death and that they were still sorting out exactly who had been shooting, and in which direction, during the exchange of gunfire that night.
Attention soon focused on a young man from Dillon. On Wednesday, February 7, 2018, law enforcement in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, arrested 20-year-old Marquis Antoine McRae, a Dillon resident, on a fugitive warrant. Local reports state that he was being held at the Forsyth County Detention Center while awaiting an extradition hearing. He was charged with murder in the death of Perla Azucena Banuelos-Allende, with investigators alleging that he was one of the people shooting at the party on Lester Road when the bullet that killed her traveled through the wall of her home.
Within weeks, McRae waived extradition and was returned to Dillon County, where he was booked into the Dillon County Detention Center to face the murder charge. At a bond hearing in April 2018, his defense attorney raised concerns about the investigation and argued that there had been multiple shooters on the scene that night, suggesting that any eventual defense might claim some form of self-defense or crossfire. Prosecutors and investigators acknowledged to the court that several people had been firing guns during the incident, and that they still had work to do to determine precisely who fired which shots, even as they opposed bond in a case where a sleeping child had been killed. A circuit judge ultimately denied bond for McRae because of the seriousness of the charge, but allowed that he could seek another hearing after ninety days.
Alongside the criminal proceedings, there were further legal ripples: civil filings identified Perla’s estate by name in litigation involving insurance coverage related to the shooting, underscoring how the case continued to move through the courts even as public attention shifted elsewhere. However, publicly available local reporting centers on the charging, extradition, and bond stages of the case. The reports describe McRae being held in jail on the murder charge and Martin facing an attempted murder charge tied to one of the adult victims, but they do not document any later trial verdict or final conviction in Perla’s killing, leaving the ultimate legal outcome of the case unclear in the record that remains accessible.
