By early 2024, it was clear Markayla Roberts was going places. Just six months into high school, the 14 year old was taking multiple honors classes and planned to enroll in courses at a local university during her sophomore year. In her free time, she was creative, exploring clothing design, interior decoration, and drawing, which her stepfather nurtured by making sure she always had art supplies.
“It was shocking to see her excel that quickly. She was so smart,” said Tasia Roberts, Markayla’s mother, who recalled how her daughter loved taking care of her little sisters. “She was a superstar and a social butterfly, but at the same time she was an introvert. She understood people.”
Just after midnight on April 27, on the outskirts of Fairfax, South Carolina, as Markayla slept beside her sister, her 11-month-old cousin, and her grandmother, a stray bullet tore through the wall of her grandmother’s mobile home, hitting Markayla in the head and killing her. In the minutes after she was shot, Roberts and her three siblings rushed Markayla to the hospital. Shortly after arriving, when a nurse finally pulled back a curtain, “I saw my baby laying on that table through the glass and I couldn’t touch her. That really did something,” Roberts said. “I wanted to fight everybody in that hospital, which wouldn’t make sense, but that’s how I felt.”
She left the hospital screaming.
Last April, at least two other people and a police officer were shot in Allendale County in a series of incidents; Markayla was the only one killed. Six months later, no arrests have been made and the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED), a statewide law enforcement agency, is investigating the shootings.
“The town was literally a war zone for a period,” said Allendale Police Chief Lawrence Wiggins, adding that local law enforcement didn’t hear about some of the shootings until days later. Wiggins and other officers believe they were retaliatory.
Renee Wunderlich, SLED’s director of public information, declined to comment on the investigation.
Situated in the heart of the Black Belt, Allendale County is the most rural in the state. Its population has declined from 12,000 in 1992 to just over 7,000 in 2022, according to Census data, and for decades, it has floated near the top of the most impoverished counties in America. Its unemployment rate is 9.2%, more than two times the national level. The child poverty rate is 47.2%, the highest in South Carolina, which has the fifth highest rate of gun-related child deaths in the country.
Last year, Allendale County’s firearm death rate ranked as the second highest of South Carolina’s 46 counties, according to recent data from the University of Wisconsin Public Health Institute. In July, Wiggins reported to the Town Council that violent crime was down this year, as it appears to be in much of the country following post-pandemic spikes. Still, the true number of shootings in Allendale is hard to definitively quantify, since police often hear about shootings in the community through word of mouth, not official reports; fear of retaliation for reporting to law enforcement runs high.
For many residents, the news of Markayla’s death and the weekend’s other shootings were a breaking point. Calls for widespread community change were swift. In a statement the day after the shooting, recently appointed School Superintendent Vallerie Cave wrote that it was “a time for action,” and called for a collaborative effort to address the root causes of community gun violence.
Religious leaders and council members organized prayer circles, which “allows us to feel what each other is feeling and bear the burdens of those who have been impacted by tragedies,” said the Reverend Michael O’Neal after leading a prayer at the county courthouse.
Local leaders declared a state of emergency, and Fairfax Mayor Butch Sauls began reaching out to state elected officials, like State Senator Brad Hutto and Representative Lonnie Hosey. Sauls said he also repeatedly contacted the office of U.S. Senator Tim Scott, but only received one response from Scott’s regional director, who maintains an on-the-ground relationship with the community. Scott did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
Sauls viewed Markayla’s death as part of a long-standing crisis that Fairfax could no longer avoid. “When are we going to stop burying our children,” he asked. In addition to persistently contacting the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office County Solicitor’s Office, he repeatedly contacted U.S. Representative Jim Clyburn, who responded in September, nearly five months after Markayla was killed. In a statement, Clyburn said he joins the community “in anger and frustration over the lack of action on legislation to prevent gun violence. Markayla should be alive today,” he wrote.
Local leaders like Lottie Lewis believe that Markayla’s death reopened old wounds. “She lived in this community, so she was one of us,” said Lewis, who has lived in Allendale her entire life. “I sat there [at the funeral] that day and cried. I still get choked up about it. If you can’t be safe in your house, in the bed, then where can you be safe?”
Violence in Allendale County has multiple connected causes, community leaders said. The once-numerous number of grocery stores has been whittled down to one; now, Fairfax is five miles from the nearest, and one in three children in the county go hungry. Over the years, Allendale lost its industrial economic base, forcing large numbers of working parents to seek higher-paying jobs out of the county. Without sufficient child care options, children are often left alone for long periods.
“It’s heartbreaking, because a lot of those kids are worth saving,” said Allendale Town Council Member Marlon Creech. “If they had the proper guidance, the proper parenting, there’s a whole lot more they could do than resort to violence.”
High school graduation rates fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, which community organizer and Fairfax Council Member Phyllis Smart said she believes took a significant toll on the community’s youth.
“These children in Allendale have been traumatized,” said Smart, who plans to hold community sessions with licensed trauma therapists through her nonprofit. “I don’t think the trauma has been dealt with.”
It’s these conditions, combined with easy access to guns, that Allendale’s leaders and gun violence researchers say create ripe conditions for gun violence in impoverished rural locales.
“For people who are living in poverty, they’re not able to see a way out of it, and can feel that they don’t have opportunities in the future,” said Michael Siegel, a professor of public health and community medicine at Tufts University. “That leads to a situation where they perceive that they have a lot less to lose and the normal things to deter violence no longer work.”
Lewis, who has been an activist in Allendale for decades, remembers when she was growing up in the 1970s and gun violence in the county was rare. But many residents have now grown to accept the sound of gunfire as a regular part of the community’s acoustics.
“It’s everyday,” said Lewis, who covers a stray bullet hole over her couch with a painting. “What makes us more vulnerable is that a lot of folks have become numb to this.”
Since Markayla was killed, Allendale’s local governments have floated different ideas about how to confront gun violence in the county, including by increasing access to recreation, which will help bridge the county’s generational divide, said Creech, who secured funding in 2023 to reopen an abandoned community center. “If we don’t connect, they’re not gonna care about shooting up a house.”
Mayor Sauls and the Fairfax Town Council have been persistent in their efforts to increase resources for local police, particularly with surveillance. In August, the council’s $2.5 million grant application for a surveillance project named after Markayla was denied; it would have installed cameras throughout the area and reopened an abandoned building as a crime monitoring center.
But some criticized resolving gun violence through increased policing, as opposed to strengthening the county’s social infrastructure. Se’Khu Hadjo-Gentle, chief of the Yemassee Indian Tribe, which is located in rural Allendale, said “We haven’t dealt with the basics. We need to provide jobs and places for children to grow up being children. If you want to talk about crime, it has a source.”
In early June, Sauls and Council Member Smart organized a community trip — including Markayla’s family — to the State House in Columbia to meet with Hosey and Hutto, who did not attend. Hosey, who represents Allendale, argued that little could be done in the capital to address gun violence there. “It is dear to my heart, these things in Allendale,” he said. “But people in the communities are not taking responsibility for it. You cannot legislate that kind of thing up here.”
Roberts and Mikell expressed frustration after they returned home: “He had everything he was going to say loaded up and ready to go,” Mikell said. “He just listened with his ears, not his heart.”
The Roberts family has grown increasingly isolated in their home in Sycamore, a town of 180 just outside of Fairfax. They keep their two daughters, Chyna and Jemila, by their side at all times. “Jemila is only 3, 2 when it happened, so she don’t have an understanding of this,” Roberts said. Sometimes, Jemila wakes up at night crying for her sister.
“There’s a lot of dark moments, almost every time it gets quiet,” Mikell said. His insomnia and grief have prevented him from returning to his landscaping work. “It gets very hard. You could be my worst enemy, and I would never wish for your heart to have to feel that way.”
Roberts’ repeated calls to SLED haven’t led her any closer to finding the killer of her daughter. “I just feel a little lost. I have no faith in the system.”
Roberts and Mikell are in the early stages of starting a nonprofit that will focus on organizing their community around public safety and protecting Allendale’s children. The project, they hope, will preserve Markayla’s legacy by changing the system that failed their family. “I refuse to move past it,” Mikell said. “It’s been normalized so much that somebody’s got to make some noise, and that’s what I intend to do.”
At the high school, Markayla’s death still hangs in the air. Aerial Johnson, Markayla’s best friend since seventh grade, described the confusion and pain that circulated through her group of friends after Markayla was killed.
“She was sweet, kind and humble, and she was always smiling and laughing,” said Johnson, who celebrated her birthday with Markayla and their friends in February, two months before she was killed. “I try not to think about it too hard because I’ll start crying.”
“During lunch, we all sit at this table, and it’s the same table we sit at to this day. We still leave Markayla’s seat open.”
