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Texas Police Arrest Quincy Allen, Ending a Five-Week Shooting Spree Across the Carolinas

The 22-year-old Columbia restaurant worker had killed four people in South and North Carolina. He told police he had been promised work as a mafia hit man.

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Illustration of police cars stopped behind a sedan on a West Texas highway at dusk. Not an actual scene from the case.

A prison inmate had promised Quincy Allen work as a mafia hit man. When no job came, Allen started killing on his own, and on August 14, 2002, police in Texas caught him.

Allen, a 22-year-old from Columbia, South Carolina, who worked as a server at a Texas Roadhouse Grill there, had spent five weeks shooting people. On July 7, 2002, he shot a man on a park bench in Columbia; the man survived, and Allen later told police he had used him for target practice because he did not know how to shoot his new gun. On July 10, during a break from work, he picked up Dale Hall, 44, on Two Notch Road, drove her to an isolated cul-de-sac and shot her, then set her body on fire and went back to serve the dinner crowd.

On August 8, after an argument at the restaurant, Allen fired a shotgun into a car outside, aiming at one man and striking the driver, Jedediah Harr, 22, who died. Over the next day he set fire to a porch and two cars and threatened a patron at a Columbia strip club with his shotgun. Then he drove to New York City. On the way back, at a convenience store in Surry County, North Carolina, he shot and killed two men, and from there he went to Texas.

Allen confessed. He told police he would have killed more people if he had been able to get a gun sooner. In North Carolina he pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life without parole. In South Carolina he pleaded guilty to all the charges, including the murders of Hall and Harr, and in March 2005 a judge sentenced him to death, but a federal appeals court vacated that sentence in 2022, and in 2024 he was resentenced to life without parole.

The federal appeals court spelled the young man's name Jedediah Harr, while a 2024 television report spelled it Jedidiah. The court placed the North Carolina killings after Allen's drive to New York, while the same report said they came the day after Harr was shot.

Sources