Earl Valentine, a 45-year-old Black / African American male, became the focus of a frantic multistate manhunt in early September 2016 after a night of domestic violence that began in rural North Carolina and ended with his death in a Columbia, South Carolina motel room on September 7, 2016.
In the months leading up to the shootings, Valentine’s relationship with his ex-wife, Keisha Valentine, had deteriorated into a pattern of abuse and fear.
She eventually moved with their teenage son to Norlina, a small town in Warren County, North Carolina, seeking distance and protection from him. Authorities later said that she had obtained a restraining order, but it had recently expired, leaving a fragile sense of safety in the household just before the violence erupted.
In the early morning hours of Tuesday, September 6, 2016, around 1:30 a.m., Valentine drove to Keisha’s home on Hyco Street in Norlina. Investigators said he kicked in the back door, forced his way inside, and opened fire. He shot Keisha in the chest, leaving her gravely wounded, and then turned the gun on their 15-year-old son, who was also shot in the chest. The boy managed to call 911 and, in what police later described as a dying declaration, told the dispatcher that his father had shot him and his mother. Despite emergency responders rushing him to the hospital, the teenager did not survive. Keisha was airlifted for treatment and remained in critical but ultimately stable condition.
As officers and medics converged on the Norlina home, Valentine was already fleeing the scene. On the road, he pulled out his phone and began broadcasting a Facebook Live video that stunned both investigators and the public. In the recording, he calmly claimed responsibility for the attack, saying he had killed his wife and expressing that he felt no remorse, framing the shooting as something she “deserved” for what he alleged she had done to him. When Norlina’s police chief later spoke with Valentine by phone, he described the caller as cold and callous, bragging about what he had done and warning that he was armed and dangerous.
With the Facebook confession circulating and their suspect on the run, authorities across several states launched an urgent search. Warrants were obtained charging Valentine with murder in the death of his son and anticipating additional charges for the shooting of his ex-wife. Investigators believed he might be headed toward other family members in Virginia or South Carolina, and relatives were placed under protection while officers tracked leads that stretched along the East Coast. Police repeatedly warned the public that he was considered armed, dangerous, and possibly suicidal.
The manhunt came to an abrupt end the following evening in Columbia, South Carolina. Using signals from Valentine’s cell phone, law enforcement traced him to a Days Inn on Plumbers Road, just off Interstate 20. Richland County deputies and the sheriff’s SWAT team moved in, establishing a perimeter around his room. Before they could breach the door, they heard a single gunshot from inside. When officers entered, they found Valentine on the floor, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. The Richland County coroner, Gary Watts, later confirmed his identity and ruled the death a suicide; no one else in the motel was harmed.
Because Valentine died by suicide before he could be arrested, he never stood before a judge or jury to answer for the killing of his son and the attempted killing of his ex-wife. The criminal case against him effectively ended in that Columbia motel room: the sole suspect in the Norlina shooting was dead, leaving behind a wounded survivor, a grieving community, and a record of his own actions and motives preserved in the chilling social media video and the statements he made to police while on the run.
