Earl Goodwater, a father of six and South Carolina Ports Authority crane operator, was killed after responding when his daughter called for help.
GOOSE CREEK, S.C. — Earl David Goodwater’s role in the case was established before the gun appeared: His daughter called for her father during a confrontation at the family home, and prosecutors said the 53-year-old stepped in to protect her before Joshua Scott-Lee Butler fatally shot him.
Three years after that night, a Berkeley County jury convicted Butler of murder, and Circuit Court Judge Courtney Clyburn-Pope sentenced him to 45 years in prison. Butler was also convicted of pointing and presenting a firearm at a person and possession of a weapon during the commission of a violent crime. He received five years on each of those counts, to run at the same time as the murder sentence. The jury acquitted him of second-degree domestic violence. The legal result closed the trial phase of a case that prosecutors framed around Goodwater’s intervention as a parent and Butler’s decision to return to the confrontation with a gun after the men had been separated.
Goodwater’s obituary provides the family and work history that the criminal case files reduce to a name and age. He was a husband, a father of six and a grandfather. He worked as a crane operator with the South Carolina Ports Authority, a job tied to one of the Lowcountry’s major industries. His family held his celebration of life at Olive Branch A.M.E. Church on May 20, 2023, seven days after his death, followed by burial at Mt. Pleasant Memorial Gardens. Those facts do not determine criminal liability, but they explain the person behind the prosecution’s repeated description of a father who answered his daughter’s request for help.
The events that brought Goodwater into the dispute began somewhere else. Trial testimony said Butler and his then-fiancée had been at another family gathering on May 13, 2023, when they began arguing. They later arrived at her parents’ house on Westminster Boulevard in the St. James Estates neighborhood at about 10 p.m. Prosecutors said the confrontation became physical in the driveway and that Butler struck the woman in the face, causing swelling and a cut inside her mouth. One of the couple’s children was there, according to the state’s account. Jurors later acquitted Butler on the second-degree domestic-violence charge, so that allegation did not produce a conviction.
The couple went inside the Goodwater home to retrieve their 1-year-old child. There, Butler’s fiancée called for her father, according to testimony reported from the trial. Goodwater told his daughter to leave Butler alone. A physical fight then developed between the two men, moving from inside the house to the front yard. Family members tried to separate them. From the prosecution’s perspective, that separation was the key break in the night’s sequence: The men were no longer locked together, and Butler had an opportunity to disengage. Instead, prosecutors said, he moved toward his vehicle.
Butler retrieved a 9 mm handgun from the vehicle and came back, according to the trial evidence. Before he returned to Goodwater, he pointed the firearm at another person. That witness put his hands up and said, “I’m not afraid to die,” testimony showed. Prosecutors said the witness was trying to pull Butler’s attention away from Goodwater, his daughter, and other women and children outside the house. The episode became a separate criminal count, and the jury convicted Butler of pointing and presenting a firearm at a person. South Carolina law classifies that conduct as a felony carrying up to five years in prison.
Butler then moved back toward Goodwater near the front porch. In the renewed struggle, prosecutors said, Butler put Goodwater in a headlock while holding the handgun. One shot was fired. Goodwater was struck in the face and died at the scene; authorities said the injury was likely immediately fatal. The available trial reporting does not describe every second of the struggle, and responsible reporting does not need to reconstruct movements that were not established in the public record. What is clear is that the jury heard the evidence and convicted Butler of murder, accepting the state’s more serious homicide theory.
The family’s loss began long before that verdict. Berkeley County deputies were initially sent to Westminster Boulevard around 10:30 p.m. on the night of the shooting after a report of a dispute. While deputies were on the way, they were told someone had been shot. The Berkeley County Coroner’s Office later identified Goodwater and said he was pronounced dead at the scene. Early law-enforcement reporting also said Butler had been shot in the arm during the confrontation. Prosecutors said he left the scene with his 4-year-old daughter, then returned a short time later and was arrested by sheriff’s deputies.
At first, authorities charged Butler with voluntary manslaughter and second-degree domestic violence. The early public description focused on a struggle involving a handgun after Goodwater intervened in an altercation between his daughter and Butler. As investigators and prosecutors developed the case, the homicide charge changed. By trial in 2026, Butler faced murder, and the jury convicted him of that offense. That shift from the first arrest to the final verdict is important because it reflects how the government’s theory sharpened over time, from an initial account of a fatal confrontation to an argument that Butler’s conduct met South Carolina’s definition of murder.
South Carolina law defines murder as a killing committed with malice aforethought. A murder conviction carries a mandatory minimum prison term of 30 years and can result in life imprisonment when the death penalty is not imposed. Clyburn-Pope selected a 45-year sentence in Butler’s case. The judge also imposed the statutory five-year terms for the two firearm offenses but ordered them to run concurrently. The result is that Butler’s announced prison term is controlled by the 45-year murder sentence rather than extended by adding the two shorter terms one after another.
Assistant Solicitor Michelle Hart returned to Goodwater’s family role after the verdict. “Earl Goodwater did what any good father would do: he stepped up to protect his daughter and grandchildren,” she said. Hart argued that Butler’s responsibility could not be reduced to the instant the gun fired because he had already been separated from Goodwater, then chose to get a weapon and come back. She called the case a “domino effect” driven by Butler’s decisions. Her statement was advocacy from the prosecution, but it tracked the sequence jurors heard before they returned the murder and firearm convictions.
The verdict also preserved an important distinction in the record. Butler was convicted of killing Goodwater and of the two gun offenses, but he was acquitted of second-degree domestic violence. That means the jury did not endorse every count the prosecution submitted, even though testimony about the alleged assault on Goodwater’s daughter explained why she called for her father. The acquittal does not erase the testimony, but it does require that the alleged domestic assault be described as an allegation rather than as a separate crime for which Butler was found guilty.
The final judgment now centers on the killing that followed Goodwater’s intervention. Butler stands convicted of murder, pointing and presenting a firearm, and possessing a weapon during a violent crime, with a 45-year controlling sentence. The latest verified reports reviewed for this story did not identify a scheduled appeal or other post-trial hearing. For Goodwater’s family, the criminal case’s present endpoint is a sentence imposed more than three years after the night he responded to his daughter’s call for help.
Author note: Last updated October 19, 2026.