Ellie Becoat III, a 23-year-old Black man from Pamplico, South Carolina, was known to those closest to him as “Little E,” a soft-spoken son, brother, and friend who split his time between work, service, and the music he loved. He was born in Florence in December 1993, attended the public schools in Pamplico, and was a member of Aimwell Missionary Baptist Church, where his quiet reliability made him a steady presence.
He served in the United States Naval Reserves from late 2012 until 2016, then went to work at Johnson Controls in Florence, building a life that balanced responsibility with his passion for DJ-ing and spending time with family and friends. Loved ones later described him as the kind of young man who would help anyone he could, a calm, generous personality whose easy smile was remembered in tributes and online memorials after his death.
On Sunday afternoon, October 1, 2017, the ordinary quiet of the Pamplico community was shattered by gunfire. Deputies from the Florence County Sheriff’s Office were called to a report of a shooting near Pamplico, with neighbors describing a sudden swarm of law enforcement vehicles and more than a dozen officers converging on the scene. The early reports simply said one person had been shot as investigators tried to piece together what had happened along Main Street. As the afternoon wore on, it became clear that the victim was gravely wounded. By the time authorities notified the public, they confirmed that the person shot on East Main Street in Pamplico had died from his injuries, and that the killing was being investigated as a homicide.
Within a day, the man killed in the attack was publicly identified as Ellie Becoat III. Investigators said he had been gunned down on East Main Street, shot with a handgun in the middle of town. Almost immediately, the Florence County Sheriff’s Office named a suspect: 22-year-old Zafir Abdul Bethea of Pamplico. Authorities announced that Bethea was wanted on charges of murder and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, warning the public that he should be considered armed and dangerous and urging anyone who knew his whereabouts to come forward. At the time of the shooting, officials noted that Bethea had already been charged in a separate 2015 killing in Florence, underscoring the concern and urgency around getting him into custody.
In the days after Ellie’s death, the search for Bethea widened beyond South Carolina. A few days later, investigators announced that the man they accused of shooting and killing Ellie on East Main Street had been located hundreds of miles away. Working with the U.S. Marshals Fugitive Task Force and the FBI, authorities arrested Bethea in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in connection with the murder. Law enforcement also revealed that two Philadelphia men, 18-year-old Rymir Jamal Steven and 33-year-old Ricky Hyseem Smith, had been taken into custody on accessory-after-the-fact charges. Investigators alleged that after the shooting in Pamplico, Bethea fled the state and that Steven and Smith helped him leave South Carolina and travel to Philadelphia, assisting his efforts to evade capture.
After his arrest, Bethea’s case slowly moved back toward the community where Ellie had been killed. By the following summer, the Florence County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that Bethea had been extradited from Pennsylvania and returned to South Carolina. Officials said he was being held at the Florence County Detention Center on the original charges of murder and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime, and that he was scheduled to appear before a magistrate for an explanation of the charges, with a bond hearing to follow later before a Circuit Court judge. Records from the detention center indicated he did not appear for that initial magistrate hearing, leaving the more consequential bond decision to the higher court. For Ellie’s family and neighbors, the extradition marked a grim but important milestone: the man accused of taking his life was finally back in the same jurisdiction where the shooting had occurred.
The legal resolution came the next year, just as a trial was about to begin. In December 2018, prosecutors in the 12th Circuit Solicitor’s Office announced that Bethea had chosen to plead guilty rather than face a jury. In court, he admitted to voluntary manslaughter for Ellie Becoat III’s killing on East Main Street the previous October and also pled guilty to voluntary manslaughter in the separate 2015 shooting death of Terrell Quantrev Smith in Florence. A circuit judge sentenced Bethea, then 23, to a total of 30 years in prison for the two killings. The solicitor later said Bethea had been scheduled to stand trial when he suddenly changed course and entered the guilty pleas, sparing Ellie’s family the ordeal of a full trial but at the cost of leaving some questions about motive forever unanswered.
In the years since, Ellie’s name has lived on in memorial pages and tributes that sketch the outlines of the life interrupted on that fall Sunday. Friends remember him as talented and kind, someone who loved art and DJ-ing, whose time in the Navy and his job in Florence showed how seriously he took his responsibilities, even while staying playful with the people he loved. Online, dozens of virtual candles burn in his memory, and his service as a Navy reservist is formally recognized in veterans’ remembrance archives. For Pamplico, his death is one of several gun-violence losses that mark the town’s recent history, but for those who knew him, the story is more intimate: a young man with a gentle voice and a bright future, taken suddenly on a quiet street, and a community that had to watch the long arc of an investigation, a manhunt, extradition, and conviction before there was any measure of justice.
