Prosecutors seek death penalty for Upstate man accused of killing 5 in Inman

SPARTANBURG COUNTY—South Carolina prosecutors announced Thursday that they will be seeking the death penalty for a man who confessed to murdering five people in Inman on October 9, 2022.

James Douglas Drayton, 26, was taken into custody in Burke County, Georgia, on the day after the murders of James Derek Baldwin, 49; Roman Christean Megael Rocha, 19; Thomas Ellis Anderson, 37; Adam Daniel Morley, 32; and Mark Allen Hewitt, 59. He later confessed to the crimes, which occurred at a home on Bobo Drive, about five minutes from Inman’s downtown.

“This is the largest single murder we’ve had in Spartanburg County,” Spartanburg Sheriff Chuck Wright said in a press conference after the arrest.

Georgia deputies spotted Drayton in a vehicle stolen from the murder scene after he allegedly tried to commit an armed robbery and kidnapping. Drayton reportedly told investigators he had been on methamphetamine for four straight days at the time of the murders. Authorities say all five victims were also drug users and were known to Drayton, who had been staying at the home.

Barry Barnette, the solicitor of South Carolina’s Seventh Judicial Circuit, filed the notice that the state was seeking the death penalty on Monday, saying that the trial was to be set after thirty days.

The SC Supreme Court ruled in July that the state can execute death row inmates by firing squad, lethal injection, or the electric chair, with two dissenting judges saying that they did not feel the firing squad was a legal way to kill an inmate and one adding that the electric chair should be considered cruel and unusual punishment. The state has executed 43 inmates since the death penalty was reinstated in 1974, the most recent in 2011.

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