On a February afternoon in 2025, the modest stretch of Dunbar Street near downtown Myrtle Beach shifted from an ordinary neighborhood corridor into the center of a tragedy that would ripple back to the small city of Mullins and a close-knit family still learning how to speak about their loss. The man at the heart of it, Peter Murphy, had roots that ran deep in Marion County long before his name ever appeared in a police report.
Peter Murphy, a 41-year-old Black man from Mullins, South
Carolina, was born on April 29, 1983, at the hospital in Conway and grew up in Mullins, where he worked at the local animal shelter for more than a decade, later pursuing an associate of science degree in business administration through Colorado Technical University. His obituary describes a son and brother known for his protective streak, a “guardian” in the eyes of his siblings, someone who stepped in quietly when he sensed his family was struggling and who was remembered for a tough exterior wrapped around a generous, watchful heart. Friends and relatives recalled him as a constant presence in their lives, a man whose love, they wrote, would continue to guide them even after his death.
On Friday, February 14, 2025, Murphy’s path led him from Mullins to Myrtle Beach, though investigators later said they did not know how long he had been in the coastal city or why he was there that day. Late that afternoon, calls to 911 reported gunfire in the 1100 block of Dunbar Street, a mixed residential area not far from the city’s core. Responding officers from the Myrtle Beach Police Department arrived just before 5 p.m. to find that the violence had already run its course.
According to a police report summarized by local news, the person described in that report as the “offender” was already dead when officers reached the scene; Horry County Chief Deputy Coroner Tamara Willard later identified him as Peter Murphy of Mullins and confirmed he had been shot. As detectives pieced together what had happened inside the residence, they concluded that Murphy had used force to get into someone else’s unit shortly before the shooting. The person inside that unit survived, taken from the scene to a hospital for treatment and expected to recover, leaving investigators with a survivor’s account but also with a complicated narrative about who had been defending whom in the seconds before the fatal shot was fired.
While officers secured the scene, they searched the home and reported finding a clear plastic bag containing what appeared to be crack cocaine on a coffee table, along with marijuana and methamphetamine elsewhere in the unit. Those discoveries shifted part of the case toward narcotics enforcement: Myrtle Beach police later identified two men, Morris Ross and Norris Ross, who were taken into custody and booked at the J. Reuben Long Detention Center on multiple drug charges. Court and jail records cited in local reporting show that each man faced several narcotics-related counts, and that judges set high bonds—$200,000 for Morris Ross and $300,000 for Norris Ross—keeping them behind bars while their drug cases moved forward.
Even as those arrests were announced, authorities drew a sharp line between the drug charges and the killing itself. Myrtle Beach police publicly confirmed that they were investigating Murphy’s death but, as of the most recent reports, had not announced any arrest directly tied to the shooting on Dunbar Street or disclosed whether the surviving resident who had been inside the unit would face any charges related to the use of deadly force. Gun Violence Archive logged the incident as a single-fatality shooting at 1103 Dunbar Street, and a page on GunMemorial.org marked Murphy as “lost to gun violence” on February 14, 2025, a brief digital record joined by candles lit in his memory by people who knew him and by strangers who knew only his name.
Back in Mullins, the story told at his funeral and in his obituary ran on a different track than the terse language of police reports and crime databases. Family members spoke about a man who had watched over them since childhood, a brother whose “unshakeable determination” and instinct to protect made him feel like a shield against the world’s worst moments. They listed parents, siblings, a surviving daughter, nieces, nephews, a “special friend,” and a wide circle of aunts, uncles, and cousins, all of them now left to reconcile the image of the guardian they knew with the sparse, unsettling details emerging from that apartment on Dunbar Street—a life remembered in full at home, even as the official story of his death in Myrtle Beach remains, for now, without a final legal conclusion.
