The suspect charged in connection with a shooting at a mall in South Carolina on Saturday could soon be allowed to return to work under bond conditions, according to the Columbia Police Department.
There were initially three suspects who were detained by law enforcement, but two of them were released after police said they did not believe that they were involved in the shooting.
The one suspect who was charged, a 22-year-old black male, was charged with Unlawful Carrying of a Pistol, and additional charges may be forthcoming.
“CPD investigators have seized one firearm related to the incident. Preliminary examination of ballistic evidence collected from the scene indicates that at least two different firearms were used by two suspects,” the Columbia Police Department said in a statement. “It is believed that the shooting was an isolated incident between the suspects and likely stemmed from an on-going conflict.”
The department later released an update from the courts on the case, noting that “a judge set a $25,000 surety bond for [the] shooting suspect.”
“He is also on house arrest & ordered to wear an ankle monitor. The judge will allow [the suspect] to travel from home to work certain times of the day,” the department added. “A judge also prohibits [the suspect] from contacting the injured victims or other persons involved in the isolated shooting incident. All persons charged/arrested are presumed innocent until or unless proven guilty in a court of law.”
Fox News highlighted details regarding the victims of the shooting:
The 14 victims range in age from 15 to 73. At least nine of them suffered gunshot wounds, while the other five were injured while trying to flee the chaos.
The 73-year-old victim is still being treated at a local hospital, while the other 13 victims have been released.
Due to company policy, The Daily Wire does not publish the names or photographs of alleged mass shooters due to studies showing that the attention mass shooters receive in the media can contribute to future mass shootings.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro wrote in 2018:
As Professor Jennifer Johnston and Andrew Joy of Western New Mexico University found in a paper presented to the American Psychological Association’s annual convention in 2016, “media contagion” can help make mass shootings more common. “Unfortunately,” said Johnston, “we find that a cross-cutting trait among many profiles of mass shooters is desire for fame.” The rise of such a trait in mass shooters, she claimed, rose “in correspondence to the emergence of widespread 24-hours news coverage on cable news programs, and the rise of the internet during the same period.” Johnston recommended a media pact to “no longer share, reproduce, or retweet the names, faces, detailed histories or long-winded statements of killers, we could see a dramatic reduction in mass shootings in one to two years.” …
We will still report the backgrounds of mass shooters, biographical details, the type of weapons used in such shootings, how such weapons were obtained, and other details that could make a difference in the public debate with regard to policymaking. But we will not contribute to the unintentional glorification of shooters themselves by giving their names and faces airtime. Instead, we will continue to focus on the victims of such awful attacks, and the heroes who all too often must give of themselves to stop them.
