GOOSE CREEK — Nearly two years after a 21-year-old was fatally shot, two men have been arrested and charged with his murder.
Investigators with the Berkeley County Sheriff's Office arrested one suspect in late January and the second on March 26. Both men were charged after new evidence was discovered and the case that had gone unsolved since April 2023 was reassigned to another detective around the beginning of the year.
Joseph Richard Gene Graddick and Zierre Rahmel Jackson now face murder charges in the April 11, 2023, death of Joshua Bautista Vidal, 21. A third suspect in the case has not yet been charged.
Vidal was shot in the neck just after midnight while sitting in the driver's seat of his blue Dodge Durango in an apartment complex parking lot on South Cranford Road. The incident was captured on surveillance cameras, according to court records provided to The Post and Courier.
Three men walked across a Food Lion parking lot toward the apartment complex at 12:11 a.m. The victim's vehicle then pulled into the complex, and a man wearing a red puffy jacket showed him where to park. Vidal backed into a parking spot, and the man in the red puffy jacket entered the vehicle on the back driver's side.
"Within seconds" three people fled the vehicle. The victim, suffering from a gunshot wound, accelerated his vehicle into a nearby apartment, "pinning an innocent resident under her couch," according to an arrest warrant affidavit.
Vidal died within minutes.
Footage shows the trio then walked back across the parking lot at 12:28 a.m., away from the incident location "as if nothing had happened," records show.
The investigation determined the front-seat passenger was Graddick, who was arrested on a murder charge in January. Social media accounts showed that he and the victim planned to meet up that night to record music. An Instagram Live video showed three people, including Graddick and Vidal, rapping in a makeshift studio.
Graddick provided a statement to police on March 19, identifying the other person in the video and the man who sat in the back passenger-side of the vehicle he knew by his street name of "Lo Bubbie." Police later identified "Lo Bubbie" as Jackson and arrested him on March 26.
Footage from three separate security camera systems place Jackson at the incident location at the time of the murder, according to the affidavit. Records show this is the first time Jackson has been arrested in the tri-county area.
It is unclear if deputies have identified the third person who was captured on surveillance footage wearing the puffy red jacket. That man, who sat directly behind the driver's side, is believed to have fired the shot that killed Vidal, according to Jackson's arrest warrant. In South Carolina, all participants in a crime can be charged with murder, whether or not they physically killed the victim.
The Berkeley County Sheriff's Office is continuing to investigate the case, according to a department spokesperson. They were unable to answer all other questions.