Mikal Mahdi

Mikal Deen Mahdi (March 20, 1983 – April 11, 2025) was an American convicted spree killer who was executed for the murder of a police officer in South Carolina. Over a period of three days in July 2004, Mahdi, then a resident of Virginia, went on a multistate crime spree, committing carjacking, firearm robbery, and three murders, two of which he was tried for and found guilty. Mahdi fled the state after murdering a man in Brunswick County, Virginia, following a drug deal gone wrong. Although Mahdi confessed to that crime, he was never tried because of his two later murder convictions. Mahdi then robbed and killed a 29-year-old convenience store clerk, Christopher Jason Boggs, in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, on July 15, 2004. Two days after the murder of Boggs, Mahdi carjacked a man and stole his car in Columbia, South Carolina, before fleeing to a local farm in Calhoun County, South Carolina, where he murdered 56-year-old off-duty police officer James Myers, whose body was doused in diesel fuel and burned by Mahdi. Mahdi went on the run for about four days before he was arrested in Florida on July 21, 2004, and extradited back to South Carolina to be charged with the fatal shooting of Myers. Mahdi was convicted of the murder and other charges in South Carolina and sentenced to death in 2006. After his extradition to North Carolina for trial, Mahdi was sentenced to life without parole in 2011 for the murder of Boggs. On April 11, 2025, Mahdi was executed by firing squad—only the second such execution in South Carolina and the fifth in the United States since 1976—but the execution was botched when the squad missed the intended target, resulting in a prolonged death.