Rick Chow Murder Acquittal Analysis

May 2023:  Rick Chow, Columbia South Carolina gas station owner, chases down and shoots to death 14-year-old Cyrus Carmack-Belton following a suspected (and disproven) shoplifting incident.

June 2026:  Chow is found NOT GUILTY of Murder.

The video will be on That LEO Guy Facebook and Instagram.

Here's my analysis of the investigation, prosecutorial strategies (and perhaps mistakes) and what led to Chow walking free.

-LEO

Transcript

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Good morning. It's Leo. Welcome back to the show. Good afternoon, perhaps. Today I want to get into the trial and not guilty verdict of Rick Chow in the shooting death of Cyrus Carmack Belton. Cyrus was a 14-year-old living in Columbia, South Carolina. And Rick Chow was is a gas station owner in Columbia. And Rick and his son believed that Cyrus stole some water. I don't know if they knew him or they just saw in the surveillance video, which I've watched. You can clearly see him picking up water he has on a backpack. And then it looks like he's putting it back, but it's a little bit hard to tell. At the time of his death, he did not have any water bottles on him. But Rick Chow's wife confronts him, and Cyrus can be seen patting his pockets and saying, heard saying, I don't have any water. And then as he leaves the store, Rick and his son start chasing him, and they chase him down the street. A shooting ensues, and Cyrus is found to have a gun. He's 14 and he did have a gun on him. It's on the ground next to him. Rick claims self-defense. The son testified that Cyrus pointed the gun at him, and Cyrus passed away from one bullet hole to the back, to the lower back, with the angle of the bullet going a little bit upward, the belief being that he was in a forward-leaning running posture, as the defense experts testified. So June 1st, Rick Chow was found not guilty of murder. And I want to go into some of the a little bit of the legal stuff and the stuff that might matter to law enforcement, that it might help you to know because you think someone's shot in the back, whether there's a gun on the ground or not, and you chase them for stealing some water, like why were you even out there? So I want to go into that and some of the witness testimony that I saw. And just remember, a jury can go either way. So if you're a law enforcement officer and somebody's going to trial and you think that case is absolutely bulletproof, man, I've seen some shockers of verdicts, hung juries, and just some wild defense strategies that work, some very smart defense attorneys that can pull stuff off. So the first question to me is why was he even chasing him? If a 14-year-old, I mean, you don't know he's 14, but a kid is stealing from your store, let's say he did have some water bottles or whatever, why are you even chasing him down the street? And the objective, emotionless answer is the store owner was tired of constantly being victimized. You see this time and again where an incident escalates into a violent encounter, maybe not because that person did something, but because that store clerk, that store owner, is constantly getting robbed. People are getting shot in the store. I mean, I looked at the history of that store a little bit, and there are a lot of incidents up there: assault, robbery, theft, all this stuff. It's it's nonstop. So the store owner was tired. I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying that's why you see the reaction you do of the aggressive confrontation instead of just, I'm gonna go ahead and let that go. Um he was tired of it. His family was tired of it, his wife and kid were ready to get involved because they probably have people in there stealing all the time. Again, I'm not saying that reaction's right. I'm just saying that's why you see a clerk running down the street. I've seen it in person on Augusta Avenue in Savannah where store clerks go outside and get involved in confrontations with a gun because it's happening right in front of their store and they're tired of it. So it does happen. Witnesses, man, witness statements always have inconsistencies. There were in this trial. I saw a video of the a witness getting cross-examined on direct, you know, by the defense. It was a defense witness. I'm sorry, it was a prosecution witness, and he did good. He said he he saw this, he saw the you know, the victim running away, and he saw him get shot in the back, and he said all the right things, and he saw it firsthand with his own eyes, he was right there. Well, on body cam, the defense starts saying, Well, didn't you say on body cam that you saw them running in your mirror and that was it? So at the scene originally, this same witness, it appears, was saying, I watched this unfold in my rear view mirror. And we all know how that is not great. But then he went on the stand and just even if you just doctor it a little bit, or not you, if your witness just doctors it a little bit and changes it to, oh yeah, no, I was looking right at it. I had a perfect view. They were, they were right in front of me. And they lie, which is what that's called, right? You changed your story. He witnessed someone being shot to death. He remembers what angle he had, whether he was looking in a mirror at a reflection through a window, or whether he was looking straight on, but he changed the story for whatever reason. Probably because he felt the guy was guilty. And so he was like, I'm just gonna just put a little touch on this. But that's enough to open a whole line of questioning. So that's a good thing to remember, not only for your witnesses, but for when you're testifying, even a slight spin can destroy your credibility and negate your whole testimony. So if you keep that in mind, you won't spin it and say you saw something you didn't see. And you're always just going to have inconsistencies, man. People see things from different angles. And some of us may have been in classrooms where, you know, in some kind of training where they have somebody walk through, and then the instructor and they do something. They come into the class as like an observation exercise and they do something. They pick up some boxes and leave. And then the instructor waits two minutes, two, they lecture for two more minutes, and then they say, Everybody take out a piece of paper, write down what the person that came in was wearing, what they looked like, and what they did. And everybody's is different. Some people it's a blue shirt, some people it's an athlete in a red shirt, some people it's a skinny, malnourished female in a blue shirt. Some it's a 200-pound man in a white shirt. It's maybe not that extreme, but it's always different. So it's likely that the defense of Rick Chow exploited these discrepancies. Exploit, I'm not saying they uh exploited like made it uh created smoke and mirrors, but they did create enough to get a not guilty verdict based on the facts that were presented by the prosecution. So be prepared for witness inconsistencies. And um, that's your your lawyer's job to get ahead of that or your, you know, your prosecutor's job, but just don't be surprised when they don't match up exactly, either because a witness lies or they just saw it a little bit differently and they remember it a little bit differently. It's very, very normal. One thing that I saw that I think was it looked like a bit of a prosecutorial game. They had a detective on the stand and they were asking him, Well, based on what you saw, could you have, you know, from this surveillance video, was the surveillance video good? He said it was. And they said, Okay, could you have investigated this water theft based on that video? Could you have identified Cyrus from this video and dealt with this later? Which is a pretty common theme in shootings, shooting investigations. Like, this didn't need to happen. Why, why did it even get to this point that you're running down the street? It's nonsense. It's a little gamey to me because any of us cops in here know uh and they may have conned some of the jury. Sounds like they didn't because it was a not guilty, but nobody's investigating that possible water theft. So if you have a store owner who's tired of being victimized, I mean, you have a dead kid. Yes, he had a gun. That's confirmed, but you have a dead kid with a bullet hole in his back that ran away from a scene. And trying to say, oh, we would have just investigated this later. It's a little ridiculous to me. I think that may have been a misstep. I'm assuming some people picked up on that. Like, okay, you could have investigated you, you absolutely would not have investigated that. I don't know. Sounded like a a bit of a misstep to me. And the last thing I wanted to cover is the charging decision. And hopefully the prosecutor on this case doesn't get too mad, though I would assume the decision came from on high that it will be a murder charge. Man, I've seen this overcharged many times. You know, they charged the officers in the Tyree Nichols murder in Memphis. They charged officers with murder that did not lay a hand on him. They were there, but they didn't hurt him in any way. They charged him with murder. As soon as I saw that, I was like, that's an overcharge. He's beaten this case. These officers are beating this case because the letter of the law for murder, the elements of the crime, involve more direct action for murder. I say, I keep saying murder because there are other charges involving causing the death of another. There are various degrees of murder. There's malice murder in some states where you went in with this malice intent. There's felony murder where you were committing a felony and someone passed away during the commission of that felony. Like if you're doing an armed robbery and your partner shoots, but you didn't and somebody dies, that may be a felony murder. You didn't pull the trigger, but your actions re had the reasonable outcome was that somebody dies from what you're doing, right? So let's go back to the Tyree Nichols thing. When they acquitted those officers, which the ones that actually laid hands on him and beat him to death, they had already pled guilty. They were already guilty. But the other ones that were just there and didn't act, didn't save him, charging them with murder, I mean, it just looked like too much to me. What could we try? Is it even manslaughter? I mean, a lot of times it's just it's lawful but awful. You should have stepped in and stopped the assault, but you didn't in that case. It's not a crime to sit there and watch someone get beat to death. It is against policy as a law enforcement officer, but it's it's generally not criminal. So this case sounds similar to that to me. Could you have maybe gotten a conviction on a lesser included charge, like manslaughter, be that voluntary or involuntary? But it was so high profile in Columbia, South Carolina that the people wouldn't have stood for it. So instead of going, instead of doing a press release and going, hey guys, we cannot win a murder trial. Do you understand? So you're screaming charge murder, charge murder as someone without a law degree. I'm going to read to you right now the statute. It's going to take me five minutes because it's long for what you're telling me to charge. I am the chief, you know, this is the DA or whoever's prosecuting it. I went to law school 30 years ago. I have 30 years of experience prosecuting. Let me read you the statute for what you're telling me to charge. It probably sounds something like intentionally and maliciously causing bodily harm, using uh causing bodily harm resulting in the death of another. Something along those lines. So does it fit? The kid's got a gun. He he possibly they're saying that he turned and pointed it at uh, you know, one of the people that was chasing him. I think you probably could have gotten a conviction on a lesser charge instead of malicious intentional murder. But when the community is screaming it's murder, it's murder, and they're ready to flip out if the prosecution doesn't do it, and somebody up high in the prosecution team says this is a murder, right? And they pass down, hey, we're charging murder here, you run the risk of losing a case. Would they have lost a manslaughter case? I don't know, maybe. We can't know that at this point. What we do know is Rick Chow won't be charged with manslaughter later. I don't think he can be, but even if he could, I would say it's highly unlikely that he won't. But an acquittal on a murder, it's it's done. And I I hope prosecution's office and law enforcement, I've said this on several episodes, excuse me, stop catering to the public as much. We do owe it to serve the public, but the public doesn't always know what's best for the case. So if the pup if social media and the news are screaming for an arrest in a high-profile case and law enforcement rushes that arrest, I've said this before several times, you're gonna have a rushed case with rushed case issues at trial time. And same thing with prosecution. If it's certain crimes that offended people, you might need to tell them, we've decided to charge this instead. And they can scream, they can stand on the courthouse steps. But what's more important? Charging, first off, it's just right to charge the right thing. Not emotionally do an emotionally driven overcharging. It's wrong to the suspect, right? That's objectively wrong. You wouldn't want to be overcharged with something you didn't do. If you did a manslaughter, that's what you should be charged with. You shouldn't be charged with murder. If you did a shoplifting, you shouldn't be charged with armed robbery. It's the same thing. You should want to charge the right thing morally, but also tactically, if you don't want to lose the case, you need to charge the right thing because otherwise you can expect these issues. I hope this helps some of you. Uh, I want to start doing more of these little forays into current events and how that impacts us and what we can learn from that. Uh, we've had a lot of these high-profile cases where people are charged and then they beat it down the road. And the big headline is man arrested in murder of teenage Cyrus. And what does that even matter if he's found not guilty? And let's briefly touch on that. All 12 jurors had to say not guilty for it to be a not guilty. Otherwise, it would be a hung jury. So objectively, the prosecution failed to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. They were given the case they were given. I'm not pointing a finger. I'm not saying you're a failure. I'm saying it was there was a failure to prove guilt. So get mad at whoever you want and blame whoever you want. And I'm not talking about just this case, I'm talking about all cases. But there was a failure to prove, and that's where the buck stops. And it was a hard case to prove. At the end of the day, there's a dead kid with a gun who, you know, there's two witnesses, two eyewitnesses that were right there, and both of them say the same thing. Their family, it's father son combo. They both say that he turned around and tried to kill them. Interested in any comments or feedback, and thanks for listening. Have a great day.