A Richland County jury found convenience store owner Rick Chow not guilty of murder Monday after he spent more than three years locked up without bond, longer than many convicted criminals serve, for fatally shooting a 14-year-old armed suspect outside his Columbia, South Carolina, store in 2023.
Chow walked out of the courtroom a free man for the first time since 2023. The verdict came after roughly eight and a half hours of deliberation, stretching from early afternoon to nearly 9 p.m., capping a three-day trial that turned on a single disputed question: whether a store owner who chased down a shoplifting suspect had the right to fire when the teen pointed a gun at his son.
The case laid bare a pattern that conservative Americans have watched repeat itself in city after city. A business owner defends himself or his family. Prosecutors move fast. The community demands a charge. And the defendant sits in jail, sometimes for years, before a jury ever hears the facts.
The confrontation began when Chow and his son, Andy Chow, suspected Cyrus Cormack-Belton of shoplifting from their convenience store. Father and son pursued the 14-year-old out of the store and chased him roughly 100 yards, Fox News reported, citing the Post and Courier.
Rick Chow shot Cormack-Belton in the back with a.45-caliber Glock handgun. The teen died from his injuries.
Cormack-Belton was carrying a semiautomatic pistol at the time. The defense argued the teen aimed the weapon at Andy Chow, forcing Rick Chow to fire in self-defense. Prosecutors acknowledged the teen had a gun but contended it fell onto the street and posed no danger to either Chow at the moment Rick pulled the trigger.
That was the core dispute, and the jury sided with the store owner.
Chow was charged with murder the day after the shooting. On May 29, 2023, crowds gathered outside the store and cheered when they learned the charge had been filed. Later that night, the store was vandalized.
Then came the wait. Chow was held without bond for just over three years leading up to trial. No interim release. No ankle monitor. No house arrest. Three years in a cell before a jury could weigh the evidence.
For a man ultimately found not guilty, those three years are gone and cannot be returned. The speed of the charge, one day, stands in sharp contrast to the pace of the trial. Prosecutors moved fast enough to satisfy a crowd but slow enough to keep a man behind bars for more than a thousand days before he could tell his side.
Jack Swerling, one of Chow's attorneys, spoke after the verdict. He told WIS News 10 that the jury faced a genuine challenge.
"We're very pleased at the jury's deliberations and their verdict. We think it was the appropriate verdict in this case. Although it was a difficult decision to come to, because you have two different stories to the extremes."
Swerling also addressed the broader reality of the case, a 14-year-old roaming a city street with a loaded firearm.
"My heart goes out to them, but a 14-year-old kid should not be roaming the streets of Columbia or South Carolina with semiautomatic pistol loaded and ready to fire."
That statement cuts to the heart of what the prosecution's framing tried to avoid. Whatever sympathy one rightly feels for a dead child, the undisputed fact remains: the teen was armed with a semiautomatic pistol. The jury heard both sides and concluded Chow acted within his rights.
Fifth Circuit Solicitor Byron Gipson, who prosecuted the case, told Fox News Digital he disagreed with the outcome but respected the system.
"Last night's verdict has brought on strong emotions from our local and national communities. While I am disappointed with last night's outcome and continue to believe that Rick Chow's actions were not justifiable, I respect our criminal justice system and the jury's decision."
Gipson added a call for calm, asking the community to honor the family "in a peaceful manner during this difficult time." That appeal, and its careful phrasing, suggests awareness that the crowd reaction in 2023, when onlookers cheered the murder charge and someone vandalized Chow's store, set a tone that could easily return.
The solicitor's statement deserves scrutiny. Gipson says he "continue[s] to believe" Chow's actions were unjustifiable. But a jury of Richland County citizens, after hearing three days of testimony and deliberating for eight and a half hours, disagreed. At some point, a prosecutor's personal belief must yield to the verdict, especially when the defendant already lost three years of his life waiting for that verdict.
Todd Rutherford, the attorney for the Cormack-Belton family, said the family intends to file a civil lawsuit against Chow. The filing status of that suit was not immediately clear.
A civil case carries a lower burden of proof than a criminal trial. But it also means Chow, having already spent three years in jail and emerged with a not-guilty verdict, now faces the prospect of continued legal battles, and continued financial pressure, over the same incident.
The death of any 14-year-old is a tragedy. No reasonable person disputes that. But the question the justice system answered Monday was narrow and specific: did Rick Chow commit murder? Twelve jurors said no.
Chow's case echoes others that have drawn national attention. Fox News noted the parallel to Jose Alba, a former New York City bodega clerk who faced a murder charge after defending himself against an attacker in his store. Alba was prosecuted under Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg before the charge was eventually dropped. Alba has since sued Bragg and the NYPD, alleging racial discrimination in the prosecution.
The common thread is hard to miss. Small-business owners, often immigrants, often in high-crime neighborhoods, face violent confrontations and make split-second decisions. When they defend themselves, the system treats them like criminals first and asks questions later. The asking, in Chow's case, took three years.
Meanwhile, the conditions that produce these confrontations, armed teenagers, rampant shoplifting, under-policed commercial corridors, go largely unaddressed. Prosecutors spend their energy on the store owner who fired the shot, not on the environment that put a loaded semiautomatic pistol in a 14-year-old's hands.
Rick Chow is free. But his store was vandalized. His business was disrupted. He spent three years in jail without bond. And he now faces a civil lawsuit.
The system that held him for three years before trial offers no mechanism to make him whole. There is no refund for lost time. No reimbursement for a destroyed livelihood. No accountability for a prosecution that moved at lightning speed to charge and then let a man sit in a cell for more than a thousand days before putting the case to a jury.
Gipson says he respects the jury's decision. Good. But respect for the system should start before the verdict, with timely trials, reasonable bond hearings, and prosecutorial restraint when the facts are genuinely in dispute.
A not-guilty verdict after three years in jail is not justice delayed. It is a system that treated a store owner worse than many jurisdictions treat repeat violent offenders, and then shrugged when the jury said the charge never should have stuck.
Rick Chow got his verdict. What he cannot get back is the three years the state took from him on the way there.
