Donnetta Heyward, 27, was a Charleston-area female whose last morning began in the dark hours of January 11, 2014, inside a home on Greenland Road on Johns Island. Deputies were called around 2:40 a.m. after an intruder crew forced its way in through the back door. Inside, the men were described as masked and armed, moving with the confidence of people who believed fear would do the talking for them.
Heyward and her brother, Wadel Heyward, were assaulted as the intruders demanded, “Where is the money?”
Wadel Heyward later described being jolted awake, then struck in the head with the butt of a gun. Even injured, he managed to get a 911 call out, but the call came with an unbearable trade: he had to leave his wounded sibling behind while the men took Heyward outside. From where he was, he heard two or three gunshots. Seconds later, she made it back inside and said she had been shot. She was rushed to the Medical University Hospital, where she later died; the Charleston County Coroner’s Office identified the cause of death as a gunshot wound.
The intruders vanished into the night as quickly as they had arrived. Investigators noted a late-model green Honda leaving the area shortly after the gunfire, a small, fleeting detail that became one of the only visible threads to follow in the immediate aftermath. Wadel Heyward, treated for head injuries at St. Francis Hospital, was released, left to carry both the memory of the attack and the sharp guilt of survival.
Within a week, deputies announced their first arrest. Carlton Solomon, 19 at the time, was accused of being one of three men involved in the home invasion. Police reports said he was charged with murder, kidnapping, first-degree burglary, and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. A bond hearing followed, and he remained jailed as the case pressed forward; investigators said they were still searching for the other two alleged participants.
Later reporting added grim specificity to what had happened outside that house, describing masked intruders dragging Heyward out and a fatal shotgun blast that struck her in the pelvis, and also noted that prosecutors at one point dropped charges against another man after DNA evidence failed to link him to the crime. Even with that shift, Solomon was still described as having been identified in a photo lineup as one of the intruders. Public accounts available online do not consistently name any additional suspects beyond those references, and the search for the remaining participants described in early reports was still unresolved in the information that was publicly reported in those sources.
