Zymir Demarco Smith was seven months old and asleep next to his mother when gunfire came through the apartment. That was August 3, 2025. This week, thirteen months later, prosecutors announced three arrests.
What happened that night
Around 4:15 a.m., officers were called to an apartment on Collins Avenue in Spartanburg. They found the infant unresponsive with a gunshot wound to his neck.
Investigators say multiple people fired into the building, hitting both levels. They recovered 17 shell casings.
The solicitor’s office says this was targeted. Not a stray round, not a random address.
Who is charged
Three people are in custody. A fourth is being sought.
Darius Wright and Christopher Mallory were both denied bond. The charges against them:
- Murder
- Discharging a firearm into a dwelling
- Possession of a weapon during a violent crime
A juvenile has also been arrested.
Mallory faces charges in a separate case as well. He is the suspect charged in the November 2025 killing of 16-year-old Brodarrien Tate, shot in a parking lot.
The thirteen months in between
This case did not move quickly. A $5,000 reward was offered for information in the weeks after the shooting.
Targeted shootings in close-knit neighborhoods are among the hardest cases to close, because the people who know what happened are frequently the people most exposed to what happens next if they say so.
The BeezLoop Take
A seven-month-old was shot in the neck in his mother’s bed and it took thirteen months to arrest anybody. Both halves of that sentence should land. The arrests matter and the delay matters, and treating the first as cancelling out the second is how these cases get quietly accepted as normal.
The seventeen casings tell you what this was. That is not a warning shot or a dispute that got out of hand. Multiple people emptied weapons into an occupied apartment on two levels at four in the morning, when everyone inside would be asleep, which is the point. Whoever the target was, the shooters knew the building was full of people who were not the target.
The thirteen months are worth being honest about rather than turning into a complaint about police. Cases like this stall because witnesses are afraid, and they are right to be. A family that names a shooter in a targeted attack has to keep living on the same streets. Solving this required somebody to decide the risk was worth it, and whoever that was took on more than anybody reading about it will.
The Mallory detail is the part that should provoke the hardest question locally. If the same man is charged in this killing and in the shooting death of a 16-year-old three months later, then the gap between August 2025 and this week was not just a cold case. It was a window. Spartanburg is entitled to ask what was known and when.
And the fourth suspect is still out there. Everything above is an allegation until a jury says otherwise, which matters, and this family has already waited more than a year for the process to even start.
The question
What does it take to close a case where everyone in the neighborhood is afraid to talk? And if one of the men charged here was allegedly involved in another killing three months later, what happened in between?
Related: eight people shot at a Florida memorial gathering held for a teenager who had been killed, and a Memphis woman sentenced to 30 years over a drive-thru dispute.
Sources: FOX Carolina · WSPA · Hoodline
