A South Carolina man was sentenced to life in prison Thursday after pleading guilty to murder and five counts of attempted murder in a 2022 roadside shooting that killed 8-year-old Quarius Dunham and wounded the boy’s father.
The sentence closes the main criminal case in a killing that shocked two states: South Carolina, where the shooting happened on a rural road in Florence County, and New Hampshire, where Quarius was a third-grade student in Portsmouth. The case has drawn lasting attention because authorities said the gunfire was not tied to a robbery, feud or chase. Investigators said the defendant opened fire at passing vehicles near his home for reasons they could not clearly explain, turning an ordinary family trip into a homicide case that ended with a guilty plea instead of a trial.
The events that led to Thursday’s sentence began on May 28, 2022, along Old River Road in Florence County. Sheriff’s deputies were called after reports of multiple shots fired at cars traveling through the area. Authorities said Charles Montgomery Allen fired from woods near his home and struck several vehicles. Quarius was riding with his family when he was hit in the neck. His father also was shot and survived. Sheriff T.J. Joye said at the time that deputies did not know why Allen had started shooting and called it “just a senseless, senseless act.” Officers took Allen into custody after a brief standoff near the property, and the case quickly widened beyond a single car because investigators said at least two other vehicles had also been fired on before the Dunham family’s vehicle came through.
By the time the case returned to court this month, the broad outline of the shooting was no longer in dispute. Public court records and local reports say Allen pleaded guilty March 5 to one count of murder and five counts of attempted murder. Judge H. Steven DeBerry IV then sentenced him to life in prison on the murder count and 30 years on each attempted-murder count. The reports reviewed publicly did not spell out in detail how every sentence will be served in relation to the others, but the life term means the boy’s killing remains the center of the punishment. The plea also ended the need for a full trial, which could have forced Quarius’ relatives and other drivers from that day to relive the shooting in open court. What still remains thin in the public record is motive. Authorities have long said they found no clear reason for the gunfire, and no public account of the plea described a fuller explanation from Allen in court.
That absence of motive is part of what has kept the case so raw. In many criminal cases, prosecutors argue over a known dispute, a planned robbery or a conflict between people who knew each other. Here, investigators said the victims were simply driving by. In 2022, the Associated Press reported that Joye said Allen appeared to be high on drugs, but the sheriff also said investigators were not sure why the shooting started. Later reports on the sentence focused on the plea and punishment, not on any new explanation. That leaves one of the most important questions still largely unanswered in public: why a man on a rural South Carolina road opened fire on passing cars. It also helps explain why the case stayed vivid long after the headlines faded. The randomness described by law enforcement made the shooting feel harder to contain, because it suggested danger without warning, target or pattern.
The impact in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was immediate and lasting. Quarius was remembered there not first as a victim in a court file, but as a child known at Little Harbour School. Boston 25 reported that classmates and teachers mourned him as the fastest runner in the third grade. Portsmouth Superintendent Steve Zadravec told the school community that grief counselors were being made available and that neighboring districts and local mental health providers were helping. “Our hearts are with the family as we support each other through this unbelievable tragedy,” he said in a message reported at the time. A church in Portsmouth opened its doors for a vigil, and city leaders publicly acknowledged the fear and grief left behind. Mayor Deaglan McEachern said “the entire city of Portsmouth is grieving with the family,” a remark that captured how quickly a shooting hundreds of miles away became a wound carried by a school, a neighborhood and a city that knew Quarius by name.
The South Carolina side of the case followed the usual path of a serious felony prosecution, but it moved toward resolution only after years of waiting. Allen was arrested in 2022 and held without bond. The charges at the start of the case included murder, attempted murder and counts tied to firing into occupied vehicles. The final plea described in recent reports was narrower in public summary: one murder count and five attempted-murder counts. Public reporting reviewed for this rewrite did not provide a full plea transcript, so it is not clear from those accounts whether any other charges were dismissed as part of the agreement or simply folded into the sentence structure. What is clear is that the plea on March 5 ended the fact-finding stage of the criminal case. The next legal steps are more limited now and would center on formal judgment, prison processing and any appeal or post-conviction challenge, rather than testimony about who fired the shots or whether Quarius died from the wound he suffered in the car.
Thursday’s hearing was also a family moment, not just a legal one. WPDE reported that Quarius’ parents, Matthew and Tecali Dunham, were in court with nearly two dozen relatives. The station said they described the damage the shooting had done to their family and asked for the maximum penalty. Public reports did not reproduce long excerpts from their remarks, but the courtroom description itself carried the point. This was a case that had lived for years in police summaries, bond hearings and court calendars, yet it returned at sentencing to the people who had lost the most. Their son had been on what relatives and reporters described as a family trip to South Carolina, and the father who was driving survived the same burst of gunfire. That set of facts gave the hearing a plain emotional force: a child killed in the backseat years ago, a father who lived, and a family that had to keep showing up until the case finally reached its end in trial court.
The story also remains notable for what it says about place. Old River Road was not a crowded commercial strip or an urban block where police were already responding to chaos. It was a rural Florence County road where people were passing through in ordinary traffic. That setting shaped both the law enforcement response and the public reaction. In the first days after the shooting, officials described a man firing from near his home into cars on the road. In the years since, the case has become one more example of how quickly routine movement can turn into a crime scene. But unlike many road violence cases, this one did not involve aggressive driving, a roadside argument or a pursuit. Prosecutors, based on public reporting, presented it as something even harder to absorb: a burst of gunfire aimed at strangers. That stark fact, more than any courtroom phrase, is why the sentence carries weight beyond the formal life term pronounced from the bench.
With Allen’s guilty plea entered and sentence imposed on March 5, the criminal case no longer turns on whether the shooting happened or who carried it out. Where things stand now is simpler and sadder: a boy from Portsmouth is still gone, his family has heard the punishment, and the next milestone will come only if a post-sentencing court filing reopens part of a case that otherwise appears finished.
Author note: Last updated March 10, 2026.