City to honor 3 fallen Myrtle Beach police officers at ceremony on Friday
MYRTLE BEACH, S.C. (WBTW) — Three fallen Myrtle Beach police officers will be honored Friday morning during the city’s annual Law Enforcement Memorial Week ceremony and luncheon.
The city will pay tribute to Officers Henry Scarborough, Joseph McGarry and Jacob Hancher during a 10 a.m. ceremony at the Memorial Fountain at the Ted C. Collins Law Enforcement Center at 1101 N. Oak St. The ceremony will be followed by the luncheon for law enforcement members and their families.
The city’s Memorial Fountain was built in 2014 to honor officers killed in the line of duty.
OFFICER HENRY SCARBOROUGH
Scarborough, 47, a U.S. Army veteran, died on March 7, 1949, when he and his partner were attempting to take a suspect to police headquarters. It was his first day on duty.
According to the Officer Down Memorial Page website, the officers went to a local pool room after receiving complaints that the man was brandishing a gun. When they got there, they confiscated a handgun from the man and placed him in the backseat of their patrol car.
While driving him to the police station, the man used a second, concealed handgun to shoot Scarborough in the head and then shoot the other officer four times as the officer dove out of the patrol car. The second officer fired back from outside of the patrol car and wounded the man, who was eventually taken into custody and charged with Scarborough’s murder.
OFFICER JOSEPH MCGARRY
McGarry, 28, was shot in the head and killed on Dec. 29, 2002, while he and his partner were trying to talk with a murder suspect at a Dunkin Donuts on North Kings Highway. He had served on the department’s street crimes unit for four years.
Luzenski Allen Cottrell was convicted of murder and sentenced to death in April 2005, but the South Carolina Supreme Court overturned the conviction in 2008 because the jury was not allowed to consider a lesser charge of voluntary manslaughter.
A second trial held in September 2014 ended with the same verdict and another death sentence. He remains on death row in South Carolina.
OFFICER JACOB HANCHER
Hancher, 23, had been with the department for eight months when he was shot and killed on Oct., 3, 2020, while he and other officers responded at about 10 p.m. to a domestic incident at an apartment in the 400 block of 14th Avenue South.
His killer, John Aycoth, was shot and killed during the incident, which Myrtle Beach police described as an ambush.
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Dennis Bright is a Digital Producer at News13. He joined the team in May 2021. Dennis is a West Virginia native and a graduate of Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Follow Dennis on, Facebook, X, formerly Twitter, and read more of his work here.
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