Brad Sigmon sat strapped to a metal chair, his hands bound, a thick black hood covering his face. The room was silent, save for the steady hum of the prison lights. Across from him, three anonymous marksmen stood behind a curtain, their rifles loaded, their sights fixed on the red bullseye stitched to his chest. There was no warning. No countdown. Just the sudden, deafening crack of gunfire. The target disappeared in blood.
The 64-year-old convicted murderer jolted violently as the bullets tore through him. Blood bloomed instantly where the target had been, a jagged wound the size of a fist opening on his torso. His chest heaved two, maybe three times. Then—nothing.
This was the first execution by firing squad in South Carolina’s history and only the fourth in the US since 1960—and one that left seasoned Associated Press reporter Jeffrey Collins shaken. The state revived the brutal practice as part of its aggressive push to resume capital punishment after a 13-year hiatus, forcing condemned inmates to choose between electrocution, lethal injection, or the firing squad. Sigmon, convicted of the 2001 bludgeoning murders of David and Gladys Larke, had picked bullets over electricity—fearing that the state’s untested lethal injection drugs could lead to a slow, agonizing death.
A witness to death
Collins, who has covered executions for more than two decades, was among those who watched the death. He had seen men die by electrocution. He had watched the slow, clinical drift into death by lethal injection. But this—this was something else.
“You think you can prepare yourself,” he wrote later, “but it’s impossible to know what to expect when you’ve never seen someone shot at close range, right in front of you.”
Collins had spent days reading about firing squads, studying the damage that bullets do to a human body. He had pored over autopsy reports from Utah’s last execution by gunfire in 2010, trying to brace himself. But nothing could compare to the raw violence of the moment itself.
“My heart started pounding as Sigmon’s lawyer read his final statement,” Collins wrote. “Then the hood came down. A prison employee yanked open the black shade shielding the shooters. And two minutes later, it was over.”
A plea for mercy—too late
Sigmon’s last words were not of protest, nor of defiance. Instead, they were a plea—one not for himself, but for an end to the system that was about to kill him.
“I want my closing statement to be one of love,” he wrote in a message shared by his attorneys. “An eye for an eye was used as justification to the jury for seeking the death penalty. At that time, I was too ignorant to know how wrong that was.”
His legal team had fought to stop the execution, arguing that forcing inmates to choose their own method of death was “barbaric.” They had demanded more transparency about the drugs used for lethal injections, fearing that botched executions could leave prisoners writhing in agony. The courts disagreed.
Sigmon had no more appeals left. No more time. Only the red target on his chest, waiting.
A return to the old ways
The revival of South Carolina’s death penalty has ignited a national debate over capital punishment. After years of delays due to the state’s inability to obtain lethal injection drugs, lawmakers passed a bill in 2021 that made the electric chair the default method of execution but also gave inmates the option to choose the firing squad.
Sigmon was the second man executed under the new law in just six months. The first, James Terry, had chosen the electric chair in December—a method many argue is even more brutal than the firing squad.
But even as the state pushes forward with executions, activists continue to fight. “We are sliding backward into an era of barbarism,” said one human rights advocate after Sigmon’s death. “The world is watching.”
For those who witnessed Friday’s execution, the debate is no longer theoretical. It is real. It is visceral. And it is something they will never forget.
“I won’t forget the crack of the rifles,” Collins wrote. “Or the way Sigmon mouthed something to his lawyer—trying to let him know he was okay—just before the hood came down.”
