OFFICER DOWN: McBee cop who survived 62 shots fired at him says town threw him out ‘like garbage’

MCBEE, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — I was crouched down on the floor of the public lobby of the McBee town hall photographing the town’s ordinance book on Sept. 26, 2024. Town Councilman Robbie Liles had, just minutes before, tried to block me from seeing the town’s ordinance book.

A book that is as public as any library book. But Liles demanded I file an open records request for it and wait the two weeks for the town to produce it, although the book was sitting on a bookshelf right around the corner in the town manager’s office.

Liles eventually handed it over after I protested his attempts to keep the public record locked away from the public and only after I texted McBee Mayor Glenn Odom, asking him to force Liles to comply with the open records law. With one text from the mayor to McBee Police Chief Timmy Knight telling them to give me the ordinance book, Liles hand-delivered the book to me in the town hall parking lot.

Minutes later, I was inside the town hall lobby photographing each page of the book. Footsteps outside the door of the town hall were getting louder and closer. I looked up to see two McBee officers walking toward the front door from the parking lot.

One was in uniform, the other was in plain street clothes. The plainclothes officer was Jerriell Wright. I recognized his face from a photograph I was shown the day of the shooting.

Exactly one week before, Wright tried to stop Alston Modlin, 27, for speeding. Wright would later tell me he clocked Modlin running 53 MPH in the town’s 25-mile-an-hour zone. Before Wright could get his patrol car stopped, he said Modlin jumped out of his pickup truck and began firing what totaled 62 shots into Wright’s patrol car with the officer sitting inside.

Wright survived, but bullets and fragments from the shooting went into his body – one shot grazed the back of his skull.

I nodded at both men and looked Wright in the eyes, speaking to him. Both officers kept walking into the secured door leading into the town hall offices behind me. I finished photographing the ordinance book and got out of town.

At 11:16 a.m., I was barely past the town limit sign when a text message set my cell phone off.

“That was the officer involved in the shooting that just walked by you in the lobby. You the only reporter in the world who would not check on him but that’s not what you here for,” Councilman Liles texted. I did not respond.

What Liles didn’t know is that long before the split-second exchange I had with Jerriell Wright that he witnessed, I’d already contemplated finding Wright in the days following the shooting. I’d passed by Wright’s home a few times, which he rents from the mayor, and it sits just a block or so from town hall.

I never stopped to knock or tried to call Wright. After what he went through that night, it didn’t feel right to make a business call to a man who likely still hadn’t healed from what he had lived through. I was more concerned about whether he had the time and treatment to sort out the mental health damage that the Sept. 19, 2024, near-death encounter likely did to him.

Something about that call just felt like the right thing to do. In my 20 years in the news business, I’ve learned to let stories develop. Don’t rush people. Don’t rush the facts.

I’m not saying we don’t vigorously pursue facts and records. I got after those things like a bulldog chasing a meat wagon. If found that sometimes you have to let the human parts of these stories come to you when their time is right.

That’s the approach I took with Jerriell Wright. On Dec. 19, 2024, exactly three months to the day of the shooting, I walked back to my desk from taking a phone call. Someone from our assignment desk placed a handwritten note beside my keyboard.

“Jerriell Wright called for you.” I didn’t have to process who that name belonged to. I untangled my iPhone earbuds, grabbed my phone, and headed straight for the side door of the station to return the call.

Thankfully, the person who took the message took great care to take down the phone number correctly and wrote it down where anyone could read it. Seconds later, at 12:55 p.m. to be exact, I called the police officer I wanted so badly to talk to for the past three months.

He wanted a face-to-face meeting.

We agreed to meet that night – under the cover of darkness – at a spot well outside of McBee. Wright wanted everything he was going to tell me to remain secret, knowing if the town found out he was talking to me about anything, he would likely not like the results.

“It was the most sickening feeling in the world to lie there and expect to die. I didn’t know when it was going to happen, but I just knew then and there, 43 years old and I’ve lived my life and it’s time to go,” Wright told me that night. He said he could hear the shooting stop, then Modlin reload the rifle and start shooting again.

He also told me about what the town did to him when he filed a Workers’ Compensation claim a month after the shooting. He also gave detailed information and text messages he thinks prove McBee implemented a ticket quota and driving officers to write as many traffic tickets as humanly possible.

We talked for nearly two hours. Wright showed me the receipts he’d stored in his cell phone, and I sat and listened to his stories of how he survived that night and how he says the town’s mayor and his own police department treated him in the weeks following the shooting.

He talked in-depth about a Dec. 2, 2024, text message between him and the mayor that drove him from his introverted life and thrust him into the white-hot spotlight of a news investigation that, thanks to the magic of the internet, will likely be seen around the world.

That December meeting would launch a series of interviews with Jerriell Wright, documenting his story, which includes the mental damage done to him, his wife and children – who found him bloody and motionless inside the patrol car seconds after the shooting, and what Wright says was a town that promised to take care of him that threw him out “like garbage” after he nearly gave McBee his life.

Tuesday March 25 at 10 p.m. is the first report in ‘Officer Down,’ our three-part investigative series into the shooting, text message evidence Wright says proves the motivation behind McBee’s aggressive traffic enforcement practices, and how he says town officials retaliated against him when he filed a Workers Compensation claim over the shooting.