On June 1, 2026, a South Carolina jury found Rick Chow not guilty of murder. Chow, a convenience store owner, had chased a 14-year-old named Cyrus Carmack-Belton more than the length of a football field down a Columbia side street and shot him in the back as he ran away. Chow claimed that Belton had stolen four bottles of water that surveillance footage later showed Carmack-Belton took from a cooler and put back. Carmack-Belton had a pistol on him, but it fell from his pocket during the chase, and the first officer to arrive at the scene testified that Chow admitted he never saw Carmack-Belton point it at anyone. Despite this, the jury concluded that no crime had been committed. The verdict drew protests across Richland County, but the reasoning behind it is not new. American courts have a long record of declining to punish the murder of Black children and of treating those children as threats, rather than as kids.
14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton, who was shot and killed by Rick Chow in 2023.
I’m fighting to document stories like this before they get dismissed or erased entirely, and I need your help!
With no corporate backing or wealthy sponsors, this work depends entirely on readers like you.
If everyone reading this became a paid subscriber, I could investigate these warning signs full-time, but right now less than 5% of my followers are paid subscribers.
If you believe in journalism that tracks the canaries leaving our coal mine when others look away, please consider a paid subscription today!
On May 28, 2023, prosecutor Byron Gipson told the jury that Chow “determined that Cyrus Carmack-Belton’s life was worth less than four bottles of water.” A driver named Laurie Anne Carson, who had stopped at the gas station with her daughter and grandchildren, testified that she watched Carmack-Belton run past looking “frightened and scared,” like a child who “needed help,” with nothing in his hands. The coroner found a single gunshot wound to his lower right back, consistent with someone running away, and no defensive injuries. In an effort to escape from Chow, Carmack-Belton ran so hard he lost his shoes and dropped his phone and backpack as he fled. Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said in 2023 that shoplifting water “is not something you shoot anybody over, much less a 14-year-old.”
Rick Chow, who killed Carmack-Belton, pictured at his trial. The defense argued that Chow fired only after Carmack-Belton pointed the gun at Chow’s adult son, a claim that rested almost entirely on the testimony of Chow and his son. Before the trial began, a judge had already found this claim weak enough to bar Chow from using South Carolina’s “stand your ground” law. Chow had shot at suspected shoplifters twice in the previous eight years and was cleared as self-defense both times, and he kept a wall of past shoplifters’ photos above his register. The jury acquitted him anyway.
Seventy-nine years before Cyrus Carmack-Belton was killed, the state of South Carolina executed another 14-year-old Black boy named George Stinney Jr. In 1944, in the sawmill town of Alcolu, two white girls were found dead, and Stinney was arrested, interrogated without his parents or a lawyer, and put on trial within about a month. An all-white jury in a county that was nearly three-quarters Black deliberated for roughly ten minutes before convicting him. His court-appointed attorney, according to a later judge’s findings, did almost nothing to defend him. The state executed him by electric chair on June 16, 1944. He weighed about 90 pounds and was so small that officials sat him on a Bible so he would fit in the chair. His feet did not reach the floor.
George Stinney Jr.’s 1944 booking photograph. At 14, Stinney was the youngest person executed in the United States in the twentieth century. In 2014, seventy years later, Judge Carmen Mullen vacated his conviction, ruling that the trial had violated his constitutional rights so thoroughly that the verdict could not stand. In America, the courtroom has repeatedly functioned as a place where the killing of a Black child is made legally defensible, whether by condemning the child or by clearing the person who killed him.
When Emmett Till, who was also 14, was abducted and killed in Mississippi in 1955 after a white woman accused him of grabbing and propositioning her, an all-white jury acquitted the two men responsible after about an hour of deliberation. Months later, protected against retrial by double jeopardy, the men described how they had done it in a paid magazine interview. The woman substantially recanted her accusation decades later.
A portrait of 14-year-old Emmett Till, 1955. The same reasoning runs through the modern law of self-defense, which often turns on who is judged to have had a legitimate reason to be afraid. In 2013, George Zimmerman was acquitted of killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, who was walking home with candy and a drink when Zimmerman decided he looked suspicious and followed him. Seven years later, three white men in coastal Georgia chased down Ahmaud Arbery, a 25-year-old who was out running, on the theory that he might be a burglar, and one of them shot him. Arbery’s case is the rare exception, because the men were convicted of murder and Georgia repealed the citizen’s-arrest law they had cited to justify the chase. Very little separated that case from Chow’s. Arbery’s killers and Carmack-Belton’s killer did the same thing. They pursued someone they decided was dangerous and shot them, but the legal system decided that one was a murder and the other was a legal act of self-defense. The pattern does not depend on the race of the shooter, and the fact that Chow is a Hong Kong-born immigrant rather than a white Southerner does not change it. What matters is who is treated as the threat. Ask yourself, if Carmack-Belton had been white and the man chasing him Black, would the outcome have been the same?
There is research that proves the mechanism behind these outcome disparities. In a 2014 study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, psychologist Phillip Atiba Goff and his colleagues found that beginning around age 10, Black boys are no longer granted the presumption of innocence extended to other children. Participants overestimated the boys’ ages by an average of 4.5 years and judged them more responsible for alleged crimes, and police officers who scored higher on measures of dehumanization were more likely to have used force against the Black children in their custody. 14-year-old Black boys are perceived as adults who should know better.
That perception shapes whose fear the legal system sees as valid. In 2021, a Wisconsin jury acquitted Kyle Rittenhouse, a white 17-year-old who carried an AR-15-style rifle across state lines into a protest and shot three people, killing two, on the grounds that he reasonably feared for his life. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was three years younger than Rittenhouse. He ran until he lost his shoes, his phone, and his backpack, and his fear was treated as aggression. The armed white teenager received the benefit of the doubt that the fleeing Black child did not.
Kyle Rittenhouse, 17, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, on the night he shot three people, killing two. August 25, 2020. In Chow’s trial, the defense described Carmack-Belton as someone “roaming the streets” with a loaded “semiautomatic pistol.” They used the same tactics that portrayed Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old shot by Cleveland police within roughly two seconds of their arrival in 2014 while holding a toy gun in a park, as an adult threat. No officer was ever charged in Rice’s case.
Every system built for an emergency starts from the same rule: get the children out first. It’s the principle behind “women and children first” at sea, and it is still how firefighters, disaster crews, and rescue teams set their priorities. We teach it as a basic measure of a functioning society. The reasoning is simple. A child cannot be expected to protect himself and has not had the chance to grow up, so the adults around them take on the risk first.
12-year-old Tamir Rice, shot and killed by Cleveland police in 2014. However, much of America does not follow this rule when it comes to Black children. Cyrus Carmack-Belton was 14 years old. An armed adult chased him down the street and killed him, and instead of protecting him, a jury found his murderer not guilty. Childhood is supposed to be the reason we protect a kid first and ask questions later. For black boys, the questions come first, and the protection too often never comes at all. George Stinney, Emmett Till, Tamir Rice, and now Cyrus Carmack-Belton were all children before they were anything a court or a shooter decided to call them, and the refusal to see them that way is what keeps getting them killed.
If you believe that confronting the truth of our past is essential to any claim this country makes toward justice, then I ask for your support.
That makes it hard to keep this going, especially when platforms like TikTok and Instagram are so unstable. I’ve had videos removed, been mass-reported by trolls, and constantly worry about getting shadowbanned or banned completely.
This newsletter is one of the only spaces where I can share these stories without censorship. But I need help to grow it.
📖 If just 5% of you became paid subscribers, I could continue bringing on professors, historians, and other experts to unpack these issues in even deeper ways.
🧠 If 10% signed up, I could quit everything else and go full-time — publishing multiple articles a day, covering the latest news, and connecting it to the hidden histories they don’t teach in school.
🌎 And if 20% of you subscribed, I could turn this into a platform that lifts up other truth-tellers. Young writers, educators, and creators who are brilliant but have nowhere to share their voices. Especially those from marginalized communities who get ignored by traditional media.
I’m going to be direct: You might think someone else will step up to contribute to this page, but that’s exactly what everyone else is thinking too. This only works if each one of us contributes what we can, which is just the cost of a coffee each month.
Addition: Some of you preferred a one-time donation over a full subscription. To do that you can “Tip” me on Venmo (TheGenZHistorian) PayPal (@kahlilgreene2) or Cashapp ($kahlilgreene00)
Dave Collins, “Jury Hears Opening Statements in Trial of South Carolina Store Owner Who Fatally Shot Black Teen,” Associated Press, May 27, 2026.
Chloe Barlow, “Murder Trial for Midlands Store Owner Who Killed Teen Opens with Opposing Accounts of Shooting,” Post and Courier, May 28, 2026.
“South Carolina Jury Finds Store Owner Not Guilty of Murder in Killing of Black Teen,” Associated Press/CBS News, June 1, 2026.
Aimee Ortiz, “Shop Owner Who Killed 14-Year-Old He Wrongly Accused of Theft Is Found Not Guilty,” New York Times, June 2, 2026.
Rochelle Dean, “The ‘Black Church’ Responds to Acquittal of Store Owner in Shooting Death of Black Teen,” South Carolina Public Radio, June 4, 2026.
Phillip Atiba Goff, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann DiTomasso, “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2014): 526–545.
Lindsey Bever, “It Took 10 Minutes to Convict 14-Year-Old George Stinney Jr. It Took 70 Years After His Execution to Exonerate Him,” Washington Post, December 18, 2014.
State of South Carolina v. George Stinney, Jr., Order Vacating Conviction, Circuit Court of the 14th Judicial District of South Carolina (December 16, 2014).
Devery S. Anderson, Emmett Till: The Murder That Shocked the World and Propelled the Civil Rights Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015).
Richard Fausset, “Three Men Found Guilty of Murdering Ahmaud Arbery,” New York Times, November 24, 2021.
“Men Shot by Kyle Rittenhouse Can Be Called ‘Rioters,’ ‘Looters’ but Not ‘Victims,’ Judge Rules,” NBC News, October 27, 2021.
“Kyle Rittenhouse Found Not Guilty, Race Forward Continues to Call for a Transformed Justice System,” Race Forward, November 19, 2021.
/ @legalafmtn
Become a member of Legal AF YouTube community: 
