The man who shot seven police officers during a South Carolina standoff — killing one of them — was identified Thursday as a disabled Vietnam veteran and disbarred lawyer who once declared he “loved the smell of gunpowder in the mornin,'” according to new reports.
Frederick Hopkins, 74, lived at the Florence home on Ashton Drive where he allegedly shot and killed 53-year-old Terrence Carraway, a 30-year veteran of the Florence Police Department, during a standoff late Wednesday afternoon.
Hopkins had been receiving disability payments of $1,127 per month after being wounded in the Vietnam War, according to a South Carolina Supreme Court ruling in a divorce case with his ex-wife Carol Hopkins.
Screen grabs from his Facebook page show Hopkins boasting about his 70th birthday celebration, where he took his 12-year-old son to a shooting range — and fired an M-14 rifle “set up exactly like one I used in Viet Nam [sic] in 69-70.”
“I … had a blast!” he typed in the 2014 post, according to news reports. “I have been shooting competitively since 1984 and lovin’ it. I just love the smell of gunpowder in the mornin’.”
Posts from 2016 show images of rifles, mentioning that he was the “South Carolina 3-Gun Silhouette Champion for 2011.”
Hopkins is also a former attorney who had been disbarred in South Carolina, and is married to prominent local divorce lawyer, Cheryl Turner-Hopkins, The Post-Courier reported.
He lost his license in 1984 over $18,000 in wrongfully collected attorney’s fees, a court order shows. Hopkins was allowed to repay the debt over time and surrender his license rather than spend six months in the slammer– but was jailed after failing to return the money as directed in a previous order. He remained in jail for two weeks, until the court allowed Turner-Hopkins to be held jointly liable for the repayment, which she apparently made on his behalf.
Deputies were attempting to serve a search warrant for another man in connection to an alleged sexual assault of a minor, who was a foster child in the home — when Hopkins allegedly opened fire around 4 p.m. Wednesday, according to WIS-TV.
Three other officers from the Florence Police Department, as well as three county sheriff’s deputies, were wounded. Two of the officers from the department were released from the hospital, while another remains in serious condition, Florence Police Chief Allen Heidler said at a Thursday news conference. He did not know the conditions of the deputies.
Heidler described Carraway as “my brother” and “the epitome of a community police officer.”
During the ordeal, Hopkins also allegedly barricaded himself inside the home with children, but they were unharmed.
Heidler, who was on scene at the time, estimated that about a half-hour passed between when the officers were shot and when they were finally recovered with an armored vehicle.
The wait “seemed like it was forever, but it was not,” he said at the conference.
Besides the seven officers, five civilians were transported to two local trauma centers, Florence County EMS spokesperson Billy Hatchell told the local station. One of them was the 27-year-old subject of the warrant.
This wasn’t Hopkins’ first run-in with the law. He was busted for disorderly conduct in 2014, and charged in both 2015 and 2017 for “running at large,” an offense related to not restraining one’s animals, records show.
He was hospitalized with a head injury Thursday after falling at the scene, and was unable to speak with officers.
In a tweet Thursday, South Carolina Gov. Harry McMaster said that flags across the state would be lowered to a half-staff out of respect for all the officers who were shot.
With Post Wires