Sandy Gaddis Barnwell was a 22-year-old African American woman who came to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for Memorial Day weekend and ended up caught in a burst of gunfire at the Bermuda Sands Motel along Ocean Boulevard near the beach’s boardwalk. Late on Saturday night, May 24, 2014, police were called into the tourist crowds after reports of a large fight and then shots, and Barnwell was one of three people who would not make it out alive.
She was taken to Grand Strand Regional Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead; the other two people killed in the same eruption of violence were Devonte Dantzler of Summerville and Jamie Williams of Ladson.
According to accounts shared by investigators and repeated in later briefings, the scene unraveled in stages. Before officers even arrived, gunfire had already started and one man was struck; as officers tried to help him, the conflict shifted upward, spilling onto the second floor of the motel. Then more shots cracked through the corridor. At least two victims were found down in a breezeway just outside the motel-room doors, and authorities moved quickly to block the view from Ocean Boulevard—towels and coverings hung over the railings as people on balconies and on the street tried to understand what had just happened.
The deaths at Bermuda Sands were part of a wider night of violence in Myrtle Beach. Police said there were two separate shootings that left multiple people seriously injured in addition to the three killed at the motel, including another shooting victim from the Bermuda Sands scene and a separate victim shot in the area of 6th Avenue South and Ocean Boulevard. News coverage tied the timing to Memorial Day weekend activity and the annual Atlantic Beach BikeFest period, when the area draws heavy crowds and law enforcement resources are stretched thin.
In the immediate aftermath, investigators said they were chasing information wherever they could find it—witnesses, cellphone recordings, anything that might explain who fired and why. Even early on, police publicly emphasized that they had no suspects in custody and would not name a motive, though they indicated it did not appear to be random. Months later, officials acknowledged that a public plea for information had not produced the break they needed, and a reward was publicized through Crime Stoppers for information leading to an arrest.
As the years passed, the case remained unresolved in the public record. In 2015, Myrtle Beach police still said no arrests had been made, describing the shootings as an active investigation and urging anyone with even small details to come forward, noting the difficulty of a case where the victims were from the Summerville area and the perpetrators could have traveled in from elsewhere. A decade after the killings, family members were still speaking publicly about Barnwell’s death and the unanswered questions, describing the triple homicide as a cold case and pleading for justice for all the victims and the others hurt that night.
