In Columbia, South Carolina, a death row inmate who committed a grisly murder over two decades ago is set to face execution next month. Stephen Bryant, now 44, brutally killed a man, burned his eyes with cigarettes, and used the victim’s blood to write “catch me if u can” on a wall.

On Friday, the South Carolina Supreme Court issued a death warrant for Bryant, despite his lawyers’ plea for a postponement. They argued for a delay due to their affiliation with the federal court system, which is currently impacted by a government shutdown.

Bryant’s execution, scheduled for November 14, is for one murder, but prosecutors have linked him to two additional killings. They allege he shot and killed two other men whom he had offered rides, during a violent spree in Sumter County in October 2004.

His execution will mark the 50th since South Carolina reinstated the death penalty in 1985. Bryant will be the seventh person executed in just over a year since the state resumed executions after a 13-year hiatus, made possible by acquiring the necessary drugs for lethal injection.

Before October 31, Bryant must decide whether he prefers to die by lethal injection, firing squad, or the electric chair. Since executions resumed, most inmates have opted for lethal injection, while two have chosen the firing squad.

A total of 38 men have been executed so far this year in the U.S., with an inmate scheduled to die Friday by lethal injection in Arizona. At least five other executions are set in the U.S. during the rest of 2025.

Taunts written in blood on the wall

Bryant admitted to killing Willard “TJ” Tietjen after stopping by his secluded home in rural Sumter County and saying he had car trouble.

Tietjen was shot several times. Candles were lit around his body. Someone took a potholder made by his daughter when she was child, dipped the corner in blood and wrote “victem 4 in 2 weeks. catch me if u can” on the wall, authorities said.

Tietjen’s daughter called him several times, getting more worried when he didn’t answer. On the sixth call, she testified a strange voice answered.

The person on the other end told her she had the right number. Then she demanded to speak to her father.

“And he said ‘you can’t, I killed him.’ And I said, ‘this isn’t funny, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler. And I said, ‘excuse me, who are you?’ He said, ‘I’m the prowler,” Kimberly Dees testified before a judge who determined Bryant’s sentence.

More killings terrorize a South Carolina county

Prosecutors said Bryant also killed two men — one before and one after Tietjen. He gave the men rides and when they got out to urinate on the side of lonely, rural roads he shot them in the back.

As deputies frantically looked for the killer, many of the 100,000 people in Sumter County lived in fear over the random attacks. Officers stopped nearly everyone driving on dirt roads and told people to be leery of anyone they did not know asking for help.

Bryant used drugs to blunt pain from alleged sex abuse

Bryant’s lawyers said he was troubled in the months before the killing, begging a probation agent and his aunt to get him help because he couldn’t stop thinking about being sexually abused by four male relatives when he was a child.

“He was very upset. He looked like he was being tortured. It’s like his soul was just laid wide open. In his eyes you could see he was hurting and suffering and he was living the abuse over again as it was coming out,” aunt Terry Caulder testified.

Bryant tried to help himself through the pain by using meth and smoking joints he sprayed with bug killer, his defense attorneys said.

Previous inmates executed have said methods are cruel

The six inmates executed in South Carolina since September 2024 have argued the state’s methods are cruel and unusual punishments, but have not been able to stop their deaths.

With the firing squad, attorneys for the inmates say the three volunteers with rifles nearly missed the heart of the second man killed, Mikal Mahdi. They suggested Mahdi was in agonizing pain for three or four times longer than experts say he would have been if his heart had been hit directly.

Condemned inmates have also scrutinized the lethal injection procedures, which appear to now use two doses of the powerful sedative pentobarbital. They said inmates drown in a rush of fluid into their lungs but are paralyzed and cannot react.

Witnesses to the four executions have not seen any signs of struggle and report the prisoners appear to have lost consciousness in about a minute.