Stephen Bryant death sentence: South Carolina man convicted of killing three people chooses to die by firing squad.
‘Catch me if you can…’ Those are the words a man who faced a firing squad left scrawled in his victim’s blood along a wall as he fled a murder scene more than 20 years ago…
South Carolina man convicted of killing three people over five days more than 20 years ago was executed by a three person volunteer firing squad on Friday evening.
TODAY: South Carolina is scheduled to carry out the execution of Stephen Corey Bryant for the 2004 Sumter County killings which resulted in the death of Clifton “Cliff” Dale Gainey, Willard “T.J.” Tietjen Jr. and Christopher Earl Burgess.
His execution is by Firing squad. pic.twitter.com/YnakvtWTSw
— Friday-Justice-Obsessions (@death_row0506) November 14, 2025
Condemned man chose firing squad instead of lethal injection or the electric chair
Stephen Bryant, 44, was pronounced dead at 6:05 p.m. following a three man firing squad who had stood just on 15 feet away before firing at the condemned man’s heart.
Three prison employees, all with live ammunition, volunteered to carry out the execution. Bryant is the third man this year to die by South Carolina’s newest execution method.
Bryant chose to die by firing squad instead of lethal injection or the electric chair. Bryant made no final statement. He briefly glanced at the 10 witnesses before the hood was placed on his head.
The shots rang out about 55 seconds later. Bryant made no noise. The red bullseye target that marks the location of his heart flew forward off his chest. He had a few shallow breaths and then a final spasm a little over a minute later. A doctor checked him with a stethoscope for before he pronounced Bryant dead according to CBS News.
Lawyers for Bryant filed a last-minute appeal, arguing the sentencing judge never considered the severe brain damage he suffered due to his mother’s drug and alcohol use during pregnancy. The Supreme Court declined in October to review Bryant’s death sentence.
5 day carnage that left 4 people dead, 3 at the hands of Stephen Bryant
The death sentence came after Bryant killing 3 individuals in 2004, including the then 24 year old man burning Willard “TJ” Tietjen’s eyes with cigarettes and scrawling ‘catch me if u can’ on the wall with the victim’s blood.
Prosecutors said he also shot and killed two other men he was giving rides to as they were relieving themselves on the side of the road during a few weeks that terrorized Sumter County in October 2004.
Bryant had languished on death row since 2008, when he pleaded guilty to shooting four men, three fatally, in an eight-day crime spree in 2004.
In March, South Carolina carried out the nation’s first execution by firing squad in 15 years. The state has used a firing squad to put to death three of five inmates this year.
Bryant is the seventh person put to death by South Carolina in 14 months after the state had a 13-year pause in executions when it couldn’t obtain lethal injection drugs.
A shortage of lethal injection drugs leads to South Carolina turning to alternative executions amid piling death sentence convictions
South Carolina turned to the firing squad as it struggled to find alternative methods to execute condemned inmates. By the early 2010s, the state had run out of lethal injection drugs, and no manufacturer would sell more without anonymity, a condition the law didn’t permit. Judges refused to schedule executions if electrocution was the only option. As a result, executions halted for 13 years, and death row cases began to stack up.
No South Carolina governor has offered clemency since the death penalty resumed in the United States in 1976.
Death row executions in the U.S. are on the rise, after creeping upward since the pandemic, when the country’s use of the death penalty reached a historic low.
