The oldest is 80. One killed his 5 children. Here’s a look at the 32 men on SC’s death row

In less than 10 days, South Carolina’s execution chamber will reopen for the first time in more than 13 years.

On Sept. 20, Freddie Owens, 46, a death row inmate convicted of murder, armed robbery, use of a firearm in the commission of a violent crime and conspiracy to commit armed robbery, is scheduled to be executed by lethal injection. It will be the first execution since 2011.

The 13-year pause stemmed from the state’s inability to secure drugs used to perform lethal injections. In 2021 the General Assembly expanded execution methods to include the electric chair and a firing squad.

Including Owens, 32 people sit on death row in South Carolina. Seventeen inmates — or 53% — are white and 15 are Black. They are all men, ranging in age from 30 to 80, with 54 being the average age.

All death row inmates are convicted of murder along with an aggravating circumstance, including kidnapping, sexual assault and arson.

Some of the men have been convicted of committing particularly heinous crimes.

For example, Timothy Ray Jones, 42, was convicted of killing his five children — 8-year-old Merah, 7-year-old Elias, 6-year-old Nahtahn, 2-year-old Gabriel and 1-year-old Abigail Elaine — in Lexington County in 2014. Their bodies were ultimately found in trash bags in Alabama.

James Robertson, 50, was found guilty of stabbing his mother to death before blinding his father with bathroom cleaner and then crushing his skull with a hammer and a baseball bat.

Perhaps most memorable is the 1988 Oakland Elementary School shooting in Greenwood, where James William Wilson, now 55, shot and killed two elementary students and wounded several other childrenand school employees.

The longest sitting death row inmate, Fred Singleton, is also the oldest at age 80. He was convicted in 1983 after sexually assaulting a 73-year-old woman and strangling her to death with a bedsheet in Newberry County.

S.C’s most recent death row inmate, Jerome Jenkins, Jr., 30, is likewise the youngest. An Horry County jury sentenced him to death for shooting and killing two store clerks during separate robberies at Sunhouse stores in 2015.

Death row inmates have been convicted across 20 South Carolina counties with the most coming from Lexington and Spartanburg counties at four each. Three were convicted in Greenville County, and two each were convicted in Horry, Orangeburg, Sumter and York counties.

The majority of death row inmates are housed at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, where executions are carried out. One inmate sits at the Kirkland Correctional Institution also in Columbia, while another awaits his fate in a California prison.

Mitchell Carlton Sims, 64 — the only death row inmate located outside of the state — worked as a Domino’s Pizza manager in West Columbia. He was convicted in 1987 of murdering two Domino’s employees in South Carolina and another in Glendale, California. He was convicted of murder in both states and is set to be executed in the Palmetto State.

Several other inmates have been convicted of shooting and killing law enforcement officers, including 55-year-old Bayan Aleksey, 57-year-old Steven Bixby, 58-year-old Mar-Reece Hughes, 62-year-old Tyree Alphonso Roberts, and 58-year-old Bobby Wayne Stone.