Husband K!lled By His Wife’s Lover At A Family Barbecue | HO”

On June 10, 2023, that little flag watched over plastic cups of sweet iced tea, a grill smoking in the humid Orangeburg air, kids with red‑white‑blue popsicles, and a family that thought it was just another summer barbecue.

By sundown, the same flag would be hanging crooked over an empty cooler, its tape half‑peeled, while crime scene tape went up around Loretta’s porch and deputies wrote “domestic shooting” on a report form.

This is how a day built on routine—hamburgers, folding chairs, cousins arguing over music—turned into a murder case where the husband never made it home and the man who pulled the trigger was his own cousin, and his wife’s lover, at the same time.

Every summer for more than a decade, Loretta hosted the Qualls‑Rudlage cookout at her place on the outskirts of Orangeburg, South Carolina. The yard wasn’t big, but it was familiar: a wide porch, a patch of grass, a small field out back with a leaning shed, and enough space for folding tables.

That Saturday, the usual crew rolled in.

Loretta, seventy, wore an apron that said “Kiss the Cook” and waved a spatula like a wand. Her niece, twenty‑two‑year‑old Zarya Qualls, moved between kitchen and yard, ferrying trays. Thirty‑five‑year‑old Jamal and twenty‑nine‑year‑old Malik Rudlage set up cornhole boards and argued about charcoal versus gas.

And then there was thirty‑three‑year‑old Deshawn Merrick, Loretta’s nephew, and his twenty‑eight‑year‑old wife, Ayanna.

They arrived together in their sedan, carrying a bowl of potato salad and a tension that didn’t match the sunny day.

“Y’all good?” Jamal asked, clapping Deshawn on the back.

“We here, ain’t we?” Deshawn said, forcing a smile that didn’t touch his eyes.

Deshawn worked as a delivery driver for a local furniture store. On the side, he ran a small trucking hustle—odd jobs, moving couches, hauling appliances. Sometimes he brought Malik in to help, paying him cash.

“Malik’s good muscle,” he’d told Loretta once. “And family keeps it in the circle.”

Those extra jobs meant Malik and Ayanna saw more of each other than most cousins’ spouses usually did. They’d text about schedules. She’d call when Deshawn was stuck on deliveries. Little things, noticed by people who watch everything at family gatherings.

“You always on that phone,” Loretta had teased Ayanna once. “That boy of mine out there working hard for you.”

Two weeks before the barbecue, something went missing.

“Where’s the money from the extra jobs?” Deshawn asked Ayanna in their kitchen. “I checked our savings. We short.”

“Bills,” she said. “Light bill was high. Groceries. You know how it is.”

“Ain’t that much,” he replied. “Not what I saw.”

The argument never really ended. It just paused, smoldering under the surface as they drove out to Loretta’s that Saturday with a pan of food and a knot in the air between them.

In the yard, smoke curled up, kids shrieked, the Bluetooth speaker cycled through old R&B and Southern rap. Loretta taped that little flag to the cooler “so folks know where the cold drinks at,” she said.

The first strange thing Zarya noticed happened near that cooler.

Later, in an interview room, she’d close her eyes and replay it for detectives.

“I was coming out the kitchen with a tray,” she told them. “Ayanna was by the cooler. Malik walked over. He stood between her and everybody else, holding a tray. I saw her pass him a little envelope. He slid it in his pocket, quick.”

“You see what was inside?” Detective Troy Bennett asked.

“No,” she said. “But it wasn’t no birthday card.”

Jamal, standing nearby, saw the same brief handoff. At the time, he shrugged it off.

“Family borrow money all the time,” he’d testify. “Didn’t think nothing of it.”

Deshawn was restless from the start. He moved from group to group, laughing too loud, drinking harder than usual, checking his phone between sips.

“You all right?” Jamal asked him quietly as they leaned against the porch rail.

“Trust is a funny thing,” Deshawn muttered, eyes on Ayanna and Malik talking by the grill. “You never know who’s dipping in your pockets, or your life.”

Around 6:30 p.m., Loretta tapped her plastic cup with a fork.

“Listen up, babies,” she called. “I just want to say I’m blessed to see another year with y’all. Family is everything. You hear me? Everything.”

People raised cups, murmured “amen,” clinked plastic.

Deshawn, already a few drinks in, lifted his cup and cut in.

“Family’s supposed to be about trust,” he said, voice sharper than the occasion called for. “About loyalty. Not folks plotting behind your back.”

The yard went quiet for a second. Heads turned. Jamal felt his stomach drop.

“Deshawn,” Loretta said gently, “we just trying to eat and be grateful.”

“Yeah, Auntie,” he said, backing off with a tight smile. “I’m grateful. Just saying.”

The moment passed on the surface. Conversation resumed. The music volume went up a notch, like the speaker was trying to drown out whatever crack had just opened in the evening.

But a hinge had turned. The comment hung in the air, invisible but heavy.

Around 7:10 p.m., Ayanna told a cluster of relatives by the food table, “We’re out of Sprite. I’ma run to the store, grab some more. Y’all need anything?”

“Get some more ice,” Loretta said. “Kids done melted half of it.”

Ayanna walked to her gray sedan alone and pulled away, the last of the sun catching the plastic flag on the cooler as she passed.

She came back about twenty minutes later with grocery bags and a face that seemed a little too pale. She set sodas on the table, laughed at something Loretta said about prices, and looked toward the back of the property.

Within minutes of her return, Malik drifted toward the rear of the yard—the side with the small shed and the open field.

“Where you going?” Jamal called.

“Just taking a leak,” Malik said, jerking his chin toward the field. “Too many folks in the bathroom.”

A short while later, Deshawn moved in the same direction, jaw tight.

“I’m gonna talk to him,” he told Jamal when his cousin tried to snag his arm.

“Not now,” Jamal said. “Not here. Y’all can talk later.”

“Later been two weeks,” Deshawn snapped. “I ain’t waiting no more.”

Jamal watched him disappear behind the house.

Back in the front yard, kids chased each other past the cooler. Somebody argued about which playlist to put on next. A neighbor complimented Loretta’s ribs. The flag fluttered in the evening breeze.

Around 7:40 p.m., somebody said, “Where Deshawn at?”

“Probably in there sobering up,” Loretta said, gesturing to the house. “He know better than to be cutting up in my yard.”

Jamal pulled out his phone. No answer. Straight to voicemail.

“He with Malik?” someone asked.

“I’ll go check,” Jamal said, but before he could move, the evening split open.

At approximately 7:50 p.m., a single gunshot cracked from the rear of the property.

For a beat, everyone froze.

“Fireworks?” a teenager said.

“Backfire from the road?” someone else suggested.

The confusion lasted seconds. Then came shouting.

Malik appeared, running from the back toward the porch, eyes wide, breathing hard.

“Don’t come back here!” he yelled, voice high with panic. “Stay up there!”

Ayanna came behind him, hands shaking, tears streaking her face.

“It went wrong,” she cried. “Oh my God, it went wrong.”

Loretta’s niece Zarya started toward the rear.

“No!” Malik shouted, grabbing her arm. “Stay back. Just… stay back.”

Loretta, shaking, pulled her phone from her apron pocket. Her finger fumbled on the screen before she hit the green button.

“I need help,” she told the 911 dispatcher. “My nephew’s been shot at my house. I don’t know… I don’t know what happened.”

When deputies and EMS arrived minutes later, they found Deshawn lying near the wooden steps off the back porch, a single gunshot wound to the upper chest, slightly left of center. Paramedics worked on him, hands pressing, air pumping, but at 8:19 p.m., they pronounced him gone.

The .38‑caliber revolver, registered to Deshawn, lay about a meter away in the grass.

Malik stood nearby, hands shaking, eyes glassy.

“It went off when he grabbed me,” he kept repeating. “It went off when he grabbed me.”

Ayanna sat near the porch railing, sobbing, insisting, “It was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to happen. We were just talking.”

Deputies separated everyone and started the slow, methodical process of turning a family barbecue into a crime scene.

The Orangeburg County Sheriff’s Department logged the first call at 7:58 p.m. and marked it “domestic shooting, private residence.” Patrol units pulled up at 8:06 p.m., followed by EMS and a field supervisor.

Yellow tape went up around the porch and part of the yard. The flag on the cooler flapped just outside the perimeter.

Officers counted roughly twenty people on scene, most with the same last names—Qualls, Rudlage, Merrick—and the same dazed look.

“You stay over here,” one deputy told a cluster of relatives. “We’ll talk to everybody, but not all at once.”

Malik was detained at 8:23 p.m., read his rights, and placed in the back of a patrol car. He didn’t fight.

“It went off when he grabbed me,” he said again through the open door. “I didn’t mean for… I didn’t mean it.”

At 9:10 p.m., investigators from the major crimes unit arrived. Lead tech Carla Henderson snapped on latex gloves and started walking the perimeter with a camera.

The .38 lay in the grass, cylinder open. There was residue on the right sleeve of Malik’s shirt. No other weapons were found. No knives, no second gun. Just beer bottles, plastic plates, a knocked‑over cooler.

Witnesses told the same story in slightly different ways.

“They were arguing,” Jamal said. “Deshawn was drunk, talking about ‘you took my wife’ and ‘you stole from me.’ Malik was saying, ‘You don’t understand what’s going on.’ Next thing I know, we hear a shot.”

“I heard Deshawn say, ‘You took everything from me,’” another relative recalled. “Then voices got low. Then boom.”

Loretta told them, “They ain’t never brought that kind of mess here before. If he had something to say, he should’ve said it at home.”

Around 11:15 p.m., while canvassing the rear lot with flashlights, Henderson checked the small shed about fifteen meters behind the house. It was cramped, smelling of oil and cut grass.

Inside, under a tarp, they found a duffel bag.

They unzipped it on the spot.

Folded clothes. Some men’s, some women’s. An envelope with $8,240 in cash. Two plane tickets from Savannah, Georgia, to Dallas, Texas, dated June 13—three days away—both in Ayanna’s name, one with an extra line for “companion.”

Henderson’s pen scratched across her notepad.

“Somebody was going somewhere,” she said.

There was also an envelope with property documents inside, but she didn’t unfold them there. Everything went into evidence bags.

Back at the station, Malik was booked on a forty‑eight‑hour investigative hold. Ayanna stayed at the hospital overnight, doctors treating her for shock and minor scrapes on her hands.

On June 11, Detectives Henderson and Bennett brought them in for formal interviews.

Malik sat in a chair bolted to the floor, hands cuffed to a ring, eyes red.

“Tell us what happened,” Henderson said.

“He came at me,” Malik said. “He was yelling, calling me all kind of names. He found out about… stuff. About me and Ayanna. He grabbed my arm. The gun was on the table by the door. I was just trying to keep him from shooting me. It went off when he grabbed me. I didn’t point it at him. I swear.”

“Why was his revolver out on the table at a barbecue?” Henderson asked.

“He always carried,” Malik said. “Took it off when he started drinking. Left it there.”

“And the bag in the shed?” she asked. “The clothes, the cash, the plane tickets?”

“We were going to take a trip,” Malik said. “Clear our heads. Get away from the drama. I wasn’t running. I came back up front. I didn’t leave.”

In another room, Ayanna’s hands trembled as she spoke to Bennett.

“He saw messages on my phone that morning,” she said. “He got mad. He’d been drinking, too. He said I embarrassed him. At the barbecue, he kept looking at me and Malik. I went to the store to cool off. When I came back, they were already tense.”

“Did you see the shooting?” Bennett asked.

“No,” she said. “They were in the yard by the kitchen door. I heard yelling. I went inside. The next thing I heard was a gunshot. I ran out and saw Deshawn on the ground.”

“And the duffel bag?” he asked, sliding photos across the table. “Plane tickets. Cash. Property papers. That’s a lot of ‘cooling off.’”

“We were going to Savannah for a little vacation,” she said. “Those papers are for a place we were thinking about. The cash is my savings. I didn’t know about… I didn’t know about any stolen money until right before.”

By that afternoon, lab results started coming in.

Gunshot residue showed heavy traces on Malik’s right hand. Deshawn’s hands had minimal residue.

The bullet trajectory, measured from entry to exit through tissue and clothing, showed a downward angle—like someone standing and holding a gun down toward someone off balance, not two men wrestling chest‑to‑chest.

The revolver’s trigger carried a partial print that matched Malik. Deshawn’s prints were on the cylinder and grip, but not the trigger itself.

In the evidence room, Henderson opened the envelope Zarya had seen earlier. Inside, besides the cash and tickets, were property documents for a small residence in Savannah.

The co‑signers: Malik Rudlage and Ayanna Merrick.

The date: two weeks before the barbecue.

Payment method: funds transferred from an account belonging to “Merrick Haulage”—Deshawn’s side trucking business.

Henderson pulled banking records. The printouts showed multiple small transfers from Deshawn’s business account into an auxiliary account in Malik’s name, the amounts adding up suspiciously close to the $8,240 in the duffel bag.

When Bennett slid the documents across the table to Ayanna in a second interview, her explanation shifted.

“Okay,” she said, wiping at her eyes. “We were planning to go to Savannah after the barbecue. We were going to start over. Malik said he’d borrowed the money from Deshawn’s business and he’d pay it back. I knew it wasn’t right. Deshawn saw a notification on his phone about the transfer the day before. That’s why he was so mad.”

“So you knew before you came to this barbecue,” Bennett said. “You knew the money he was using to set up a new life with you came from your husband.”

“I didn’t think he’d confront Malik in front of everybody,” she said. “I thought we’d just leave.”

Text messages from her phone later showed she’d discussed property payments and “getting out of O’burg” with Malik weeks earlier. The plan had not been spontaneous.

By June 12, detectives had a rough arc: missing money, an affair, a planned move to Savannah, a cousin who felt betrayed, and a gunshot during a confrontation that didn’t line up with “it just went off.”

Four months later, on October 16, 2023, the case of State of South Carolina v. Malik Rudlage went to trial at the Orangeburg County Courthouse.

The same types of flags that had been taped to Loretta’s cooler now flanked Judge Eileen Parson’s bench, this time stitched and framed.

Assistant District Attorney Michael Carr stood to outline the state’s case.

“On a June evening,” he told the jury, “the defendant met his cousin at a family barbecue with plans already in motion—to take his wife, his money, and his future. When confronted, he didn’t walk away. He didn’t call the police. He picked up the victim’s gun and shot him in the chest.”

He walked them through the evidence: the revolver, the residue, the downward bullet path, the prints on the trigger; the duffel bag with $8,240 in cash, two plane tickets, and property documents with Malik and Ayanna’s names side by side; the bank transfers from Deshawn’s business.

“This is not bad luck,” Carr said. “This is motive and opportunity.”

Carla Henderson took the stand and explained in plain terms why the physical scene didn’t match Malik’s story.

“If two men are wrestling for a gun,” she said, “you see close‑range residue on both. You see random trajectories. Here, residue was concentrated on Mr. Rudlage’s firing hand. The victim’s residue was minimal. The shot traveled downward from above. That’s consistent with someone holding the gun, arm extended down, toward a person losing balance or already lower.”

Jamal testified about earlier in the day.

“He told me, ‘You took my wife,’” Jamal said, nodding toward Malik at the defense table. “He said, ‘You took my money.’ I tried to calm him down.”

Zarya described the envelope by the cooler—the moment when something passed between Ayanna and Malik, partially shielded by a metal tray and a plastic flag.

“I didn’t know what was in it then,” she said. “But after the police showed us the bag, I put it together.”

On the sixth day, Ayanna testified under a plea deal that knocked an obstruction charge down in exchange for cooperation.

“I was wrong,” she told the court. “I cheated on my husband. I helped move his money without telling him. We planned to leave. I didn’t think anyone would get hurt.”

“Did you and Malik plan to confront Deshawn at the barbecue?” Carr asked.

“No,” she said. “We wanted to keep it quiet, then go. He found out early.”

Defense attorney David Lang leaned hard on self‑defense.

“Deshawn was drunk. He was angry. He said he’d ‘handle’ Malik,” Lang argued. “The gun was his. The scene was chaotic. My client is guilty of loving the wrong woman and making terrible choices, but he is not a murderer. He reacted in fear, in a struggle he didn’t start.”

“Why didn’t he leave?” Carr asked the jury later. “Why did he pack a bag with $8,240 in cash, buy two plane tickets out of Savannah, and sign a lease in another state with his cousin’s wife before that barbecue if this was just a moment of panic?”

He pointed again to the little number from the evidence photo.

“Eight thousand, two hundred forty dollars,” he said. “That’s how much of Deshawn’s life they’d already converted into a ticket out. They just forgot that in South Carolina, we still look at where the barrel was pointed and who chose to pull the trigger.”

After five hours of deliberation on October 24, the jury came back.

“We, the jury, find the defendant, Malik Rudlage, guilty of murder in the second degree. Guilty of unlawful possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime.”

On October 25, Judge Parson looked down at Malik as he stood to hear his sentence.

“You turned a family gathering into a crime scene,” she said. “You took a man’s life over a relationship and money you never should have touched. The law in this state is clear.”

She sentenced him to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.

Loretta didn’t host a barbecue the next summer. The grill sat unused. The little flag that had once marked the drink cooler ended up shoved in a drawer with old plastic utensils.

In the official story, the case file, it’s numbers and dates and charges. June 10, 7:50 p.m. One shot. One body. One duffel bag with $8,240 and two tickets out of town.

In the family’s memory, it’s the moment the music cut out and Malik came running up from the back, hands out, saying, “Don’t come back here,” while Ayanna sobbed, “It went wrong,” and everyone realized the biggest danger at a summer cookout hadn’t been the grill flare‑ups or the kids running near the road.

It had been the kind of betrayal you can’t see until you hear the crack of a gun behind a shed. And by then, all that’s left is a flag flapping over a cooler and tape stretching across a yard that won’t ever feel the same again.