Lighting Store Showroom Near Adams Run, SC

Update: South Carolina officials have identified a body found in a submerged vehicle over the weekend as a man who vanished last month, the coroner’s office said.

Thelonious Lamar Green, 54, went missing in June. On July 9, divers located his truck submerged in the Edisto River, according to the coroner’s office. There was a body in the truck when it was recovered.

The Charleston County Coroner’s Office officially identified the body as Green on July 11, according to a news release. His cause of death is pending.

The original story is below:

A submerged truck belonging to a missing South Carolina man had a body in it when it was discovered by civilian divers in the Edisto River, authorities say.

The Charleston County Sheriff’s Office says it responded to Willtown Bluff Boat Landing around 5:30 p.m. July 9 after a call that a diver located a submerged vehicle. The diver removed the license plate from the vehicle and deputies determined the vehicle belonged to Thelonious Lamar Green, 54, who went missing in June.

The body inside the truck had not been identified as of Monday morning, July 11. McClatchy News reached out to the Charleston County Coroner’s Office but did not receive an immediate response.

Green, 54, was last seen leaving a gathering in Adams Run, S.C., the evening of June 4, according to a CCSO news release. Family members grew concerned after they did not hear from Green, who has memory loss and relies on medication for other health issues, the release says.

After an ongoing search, Green’s family reached out to Illinois-based civilian dive team Chaos Divers which agreed to travel to Charleston. The team volunteers to help families of missing people across the country and assists in investigations and searches. CCSO said its team had previously searched areas of the river for Green’s car but did not find anything.

“We appreciate the Green family’s cooperation with the investigation and their extra efforts in working to find their loved one,” Andrew Knapp, a spokesperson for CCSO, wrote in a news release. “We thank Chaos Divers for their diligence in searching the water and helping to bring a measure of closure to Lamar Green’s family.”

Foul play is not suspected, authorities say.

This story was originally published July 11, 2022, 11:49 AM.

The debate on whether Tennessee football was guilty of running up the score on Missouri in a 66-24 victory last week could serve as motivation for South Carolina. And since Gamecocks coach Shane Beamer can be emotional, I would be surprised if he didn’t work it into his pregame speech.

If you are wondering “what does a sports columnist know about motivating a football team,” you have no sense of football history.

Former Tennessee coach Derek Dooley once allowed me to serve as a “coach” for the spring game. I don’t remember my pregame speech to the Orange team, but I’m sure it was riveting, though you couldn’t have proved it by the final score. Although we didn’t score a touchdown in a losing effort, I can remember several first downs.

But you learn from your mistakes.

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So, if I were addressing the Gamecocks before the game at Williams-Brice Stadium, I would say: “If you don’t play the best game of your life, this team won’t just beat you. It will embarrass you in front of your family, friends, and fellow students.”

I don’t have a psychological survey to back me up on this, but I regard fear of embarrassment as a greater motivator than fear of failure.

Tennessee 59, South Carolina 20: As you can tell by my predicted score, I don't have any doubts how this game will go. But I do wonder if Gamecocks fans can hold their ground against a possible UT fan invasion.

Georgia 41, Kentucky 17: Media who cover the SEC voted in July that Georgia and Kentucky would finish first and second, respectively, in the East. They were half right.

The Bulldogs have done their part. The Wildcats, not so much. And they’re getting worse, as demonstrated by last week’s loss to Vanderbilt.

Kentucky coach Mark Stoops needs to upgrade his offense. Quarterback Will Levis looks less like a first-round NFL draft pick with each game.

Florida 34, Vanderbilt 17: In case you’re wondering, Vanderbilt last won back-to-back conference games in 2018. Don’t expect a repeat Saturday.

First-year Florida coach Billy Napier might not be flashy enough for some Gators fans, but he has squeezed most of the talent out of a team that could finish the regular season 8-4 with victories over Vanderbilt and Florida State.

Napier also is making headway in recruiting. The Gators are ranked No. 8 in the 247Sports Composite for 2023.

Ole Miss 27, Arkansas 23: Remember when running backs were the stars, and the quarterback's most important job was to hand them the ball? If so, you should appreciate the Rebels and Razorbacks offenses.

Ole Miss freshman running back Quinshon Judkins leads the SEC in rushing with 1,171 yards. Arkansas sophomore Raheim “Rocket” Sanders is second with 1,147.

Alabama 48, Austin Peay 10: A two-loss regular season is a disaster by Tide standards. But even in a disappointing season, Alabama is only two plays from being unbeaten and in the running for another national championship.

Tennessee beat the Tide on a last-second field goal. LSU beat them on a two-point conversion in overtime.

Auburn 31, Western Kentucky 23: Interim head coach Carnell Williams has helped energize the Tigers. But energy only gets you so far in the SEC.

And it doesn’t even assure success against Western Kentucky (7-4). The Hilltoppers lost by three points to Indiana in overtime in their only other game against a Power 5 opponent.

LSU 34, UAB 17: The Tigers already have qualified for the SEC Championship game and still are in the running for the College Football Playoff under first-year LSU coach Brian Kelly.

But a former first-year LSU coach knows you can’t take UAB lightly. The Blazers beat LSU and then-coach Nick Saban 13-10 in 2000.

Missouri 38, New Mexico State 10: The Tigers offense should be ecstatic at the sight of a nonconference opponent. Missouri hasn’t scored more than 24 points against an SEC team.

And it managed only 17 points against Vanderbilt, which ranks 123^rd nationally in total defense.

Texas A&M 34, Massachusetts 7: The Aggies won’t go winless in November, thanks to strategic nonconference scheduling. The Minutemen are 1-9, and that’s not unusual. They’re 21-101 for the past 11 seasons.

It’s a wonder more SEC programs don’t schedule them.

Mississippi State 42, ETSU 10: This should have been the best of coach Mike Leach’s three teams at Mississippi State. It still could be if it wins Saturday and upsets Ole Miss the last week of the regular season.

Record: 68-20 (.773), 44-36 (.550) against the spread.

John Adams is a senior columnist. He may be reached at 865-342-6284 or john.adams@knoxnews.com. Follow him at: twitter.com/johnadamskns.

There are some places where it doesn’t take a compass to know which way the culture goes. People in Miami have to go north to reach the South, and people in Seattle have to go east to find the Wild West.

A similarly counter-intuitive dynamic is at work when it comes to Roxbury Mercantile, which is located 31 miles from downtown Charleston, but feels closer to the heart of the city than restaurants where the chef could lob a slice of crudo and watch it land on King Street. At least, it’s on intimate terms with the Charleston in force before tourists became restaurateurs’ most valuable guests. Roxbury is the kind of place to which locals return again and again for a fried oyster platter with red rice and greens, and the owners don’t mind if they do.

In this case, the owners are Jackie and William Barnwell, although everyone knows him as “Beau.” Last summer, the couple purchased the 6-year-old Capt. Jimmy Bell’s Right Off the Boat Seafood Joint on Highway 174, and made a lickety-split changeover, installing a full bar in place of an eating counter and redoing the color scheme.

While the restaurant is still a few days shy of its 6-month anniversary, the Barnwells have a decades-long history of doing business on the tucked-away site, flourished with live oaks and cordgrasses. In the 1920s, the family opened a country store there. It was still keeping regular hours when it burned down in 1983; the land stayed vacant until Bell put up a restaurant.

But it appears neither fire nor time could completely wipe out the soul of the country store. Nobody is coming to Roxbury Mercantile to swap seeds or buy twine, but the same conversations that once took shape around those transactions are now happening over pulled pork and Cajun fish tacos.

On a brisk weekend night, talk ricochets from foggily recalled high school pranks to the crazy things that the politicians in Washington are doing now. Even without a potbellied stove sending up the curls of smoke that might once have indicated a general store was open, the room is warmed by good cheer and genuinely kind service.

“A lot of folks say we’re in the middle of nowhere, but actually we’re in the middle of everywhere,” says Jackie Barnwell, a Hilton Head area native who spent 13 years in the food-and-beverage business before trying her luck at restaurant ownership.

As Barnwell points out, Hollywood and Meggett are in one direction, and Edisto is in the other. Residents of all three aren’t exactly maxed out on casually elegant places to get together.

“My husband and I were like, we want somewhere we can go and have a nice night out,” Barnwell says.

They envisioned a setting that would nod to the past rather than mimic it. And while Barnwell intimates the room isn’t perfected yet, it’s impossible for a guest to see what’s missing. From the wooden floor planks, selected for their “old Charleston feel” to the tasteful array of framed mirrors, vintage documents and country store artifacts, the sun-splashed room would delight a magazine editor scheduling a photo shoot of new-wave aprons.

Its centerpiece is a polished, rough-edged bar, commissioned from Justin Herrington of Born Again Heartwoods (“right here in Meggett,” Barnwell adds). Before it supported pints of craft beer and cocktails mixed with local liquor, the cypress log was lodged at the bottom of the Edisto River.

It has become fashionable to “elevate” Southern food, as the chefs say, which generally means slipping luxurious ingredients atop of deviled eggs and shaping grits into cakes. The Barnwells instead chose to elevate the room, and left the food alone.

In other words, if you make the trip to Roxbury Mercantile based solely on the expectation of culinary epiphanies, it would be best to first ask yourself how well you deal with disappointment. The menu doesn’t have a single show-off dish, and I’d argue the restaurant’s the better for it. Although variously presented as sandwiches, salads and platters, entree choices basically come down to boiled shrimp, fried fish, grilled chicken and smoked pork. There’s also a burger, although the one I tried was too big for its cooking time and sadly short on seasoning,

Otherwise, the kitchen performs admirably. Tender crab cakes, crisped on the outside, are ideal sandwich filler. The pulled pork and ribs are well served by vivacious sauces, and I couldn’t muster a complaint about any of the sides that accompanied them.

Yet the standout item is the shrimp, purchased from Captain Ashley Fontaine of Edisto Seafood. The Barnwells stick to the definition of Southern cooking that includes fresh, local ingredients, and their commitment pays off from the first course onward.

While they don’t make any claims about turning away the Sysco truck, Barnwell says they “go into town every Monday and get stuff from GrowFood.” The expert order at Roxbury, which I heard a number of customers place confidently, is an order of peel-and-eat shrimp and a wedge salad, featuring fantastically fresh lettuce and a Clemson blue cheese dressing that’s up front about its funk. Paired with sweet, sturdy shrimp, the salad makes for a fine meal.

Shrimp are also served on Mitla tortillas, which are finished at Roxbury, so the seafood meets with aromatic corn in a way that’s more vital and satisfying than the standard shrimp-and-grits combination. (The hot-sauced mayonnaise scribbled over the shrimp is great, but ask the kitchen to go easy on the shredded cheddar).

Another Southern cooking tradition that the Barnwells honor is the practice of adhering to family recipes, including Jackie Barnwell’s uncle’s recipe for she-crab soup. It wasn’t available either time I ate at Roxbury Mercantile, but Barwell says “a lot of people do compliment it.” If he was half as good at soup-making as Beau Barnwell’s grandmother was at making dessert, I’m not surprised. The banana pudding, crowded with banana slices and topped with toasted meringue, is outstanding.

So go on out to the country and eat some shrimp. If you live in, say, Mount Pleasant, it’s nowhere close to nearby, but sometimes experiences worth having take a little travel. Roxbury, for example, is delaying its brunch launch, because Beau Barnwell is currently out of the country: The retired U.S. Air Force Operations and Training Manager is taking meteorological measurements. At the South Pole.

Brunch is scheduled to start in March.

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You can spy the colorful orange and green neon signs in the Beautiful South window from way down the block. As you get closer, your nose is struck by the sharp, tempting aroma of wok oil, garlic and ginger, which puffs out over the street from discrete exhaust vents. For diners like me, that’s the most effective form of advertising, conjuring up olfactory memories of New York City and Hong Kong sidewalks.

But, as the name suggests, the restaurant is right here in the South — in downtown Charleston, in fact, on the newly remade block of Columbus Street between Meeting and King. The cuisine is inspired by a different South, though, that of Hong Kong and the southern regions of China.

Long, tender egg noodles ($23) are stir fried with local Tarvin shrimp (tails still on), sliced snow peas and just enough rich, slightly sweet XO sauce to give them a glossy sheen. Much sweeter is the thin pool of fish palm syrup that awaits beneath the Teochew-style oyster omelet ($15), an odd but pleasant contrast to the fluffy egg and the briny bursts of plump oysters tucked away inside.

Some of the simplest dishes are the most impressive. A tangle of splendid scallion oil noodles ($11) are unexpectedly cool but absolutely delicious, slick with a dark soy sauce and topped by a small pile of scallions cooked down to crisp, brown slivers.

Beautiful South is the second Charleston venture from David Schuttenberg and Tina Heath-Schuttenberg, the owners of Kwei Fei. Both restaurants draw inspiration from the cuisine of China, but that’s pretty much where the similarities end.

Kwei Fei is out on Maybank Highway in the small restaurant space adjoining the Pour House, Charleston’s long running music club. Beautiful South is downtown in a ground floor retail space in Courier Square, the gleaming new brick and glass headquarters of property developer Greystar.

GOOSE CREEK — Tee Nguyen, known by her customers as “Miss Tee,” has been involved in Charleston restaurants for close to two decades.

Starting in 1997, the Vietnamese-born Nguyen operated an Asian retail foods market in North Charleston’s Gas Lite Square. Sourcing from distributors in Atlanta and California, she provided establishments like CO Restaurant with spices for pho and dried noodles, a wholesale operation that continued in a second location after the original closed.

Eventually, the woman who grew up with 11 siblings and learned how to cook alongside her mother decided to open her own restaurant — one with “Thai cuisine” in its name.

Nguyen’s family was among the thousands of Vietnamese citizens who spent time in Thailand refugee camps on their way to the U.S. in the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on those roots, Nguyen opened Lana Thai Cuisine with the type of Thai tastes American diners were craving at the time — pad Thai, curries, larb and ginger-dressed meats. The Thai restaurant, which she sold in 2018 after coming down with an illness, veers toward Vietnam, including five types of pho.

That menu model has been flipped on its head at Pho Bowl, a Goose Creek restaurant located at 142 St James Ave. where traditional Vietnamese pho, com dac biet and wonton soup are joined by a distinct vegetarian broth bowl.

Standing out

Sun streams into this white-walled space with one exposed brick wall, reminding patrons of Pho Bowl’s previous life as a Pizza Hut. In the dining room to the right, a mother watches her daughter, who, with headphones wrapped around her ears, is happily slurping up pho in a padded black chair.

The faint commotion those noise-cancelers are drowning out is coming from the kitchen, where on most days Nguyen is baby-sitting broth that cooks for hours on end. Pho can be ordered with a range of meats, along with seafood like shrimp and scallops. The house special incorporates beef flank steak, a tender cut that Nguyen says sets Pho Bowl apart.

South Carolina softball’s historic SEC Tournament run came to an end in the championship game Saturday with a 3-1 loss to Tennessee in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

The 10th-seeded Gamecocks (37-20) started strong, taking a 1-0 lead in the top of the first inning over the 1-seed Lady Vols (44-8). Zoe Laneaux scored on a sacrifice fly by Riley Blampied after hitting a triple to right field. However, it didn’t take Tennessee long to respond. Gamecocks starting pitcher Bailey Betenbaugh walked Zaida Puni, who advanced to third on a double from McKenna Gibson. She was brought home on a single from Riley West.

South Carolina switched to Karsen Ochs at pitcher for the final out of the second inning, and she gave up three hits in the third that ultimately resulted in the game-winning Tennessee runs. Jamison Brockenbro hit the RBI single that scored West and Mackenzie Donihoo.

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Gamecocks ace Donnie Goubourne checked in to start the fourth inning and immediately made an impact. She picked up two strikeouts and only allowed one hit to Tennessee star Kiki Milloy. South Carolina was the only team in the SEC Tournament that did not give up a home run to Milloy.

Goubourne, an All-SEC first team selection, finished with four strikeouts and two hits allowed in her three innings pitched. The Tennessee pitching staff did not give up multiple hits to any South Carolina batter.

Tennessee ace Ashley Rodgers entered the game in the sixth inning with a bang, striking out out all three batters she faced. Aniyah Black gave South Carolina hope with a double to center field in the seventh, but the Gamecocks couldn’t capitalize with three straight fly-outs.

The Gamecocks were the first 10-seed ever to reach the championship game of the SEC Tournament. They upset 2-seed Georgia and 3-seed Auburn in back-to-back games, winning both by a single run and going to extra innings with the Bulldogs. It was the team’s first SEC championship appearance since 2018 when it lost to Florida. South Carolina has not won an SEC title in softball since 2000.

South Carolina entered the tournament on the NCAA Tournament bubble, but their odds of earning an at-large bid increased significantly this week.

The South Carolina Emergency Management Division (SCEMD) launched Earthquake.SC, a new website to help South Carolina residents better prepare for earthquakes.

Earthquake.SC offers a variety of interactive features, including a map that displays both current and historical earthquakes in the state, a walkthrough with safety steps for earthquake situations, a myths and facts section that covers urban legends and commonly asked questions about earthquake activity in South Carolina.

South Carolina normally experiences around 10 to 20 earthquakes annually with 70% of earthquakes in the state centering around three areas: Ravenel-Adams Run-Hollywood in Charleston County, Bowman in Orangeburg County and Middleton-Place-Summerville in Dorchester County, according to the agency’s Earthquake Guide.

This year, however, the state has experienced an unusually high number of rumbles, with more than 80 low-magnitude earthquakes having occurred in Kershaw County since January. SCEMD said that this occurrence highlights how earthquakes can happen anywhere in South Carolina at any given time.

Dr. Norm Levine, a geology and environmental geosciences professor at the College of Charleston, told City Paper in January that seismic activity here is normal. He explained the seemingly increased prevalence of earthquakes is partially due to more sensitive seismometers picking up low-magnitude activity, which most people wouldn’t even notice.

“We have experienced more than our fair share of low-magnitude earthquakes this year,” SCEMD director Kim Stension said in a press release. “None of them have been large enough to cause any damage, but we encourage everyone to be prepared for a major earthquake, however unlikely the possibility may be.”

Levine said the state had two sets of fault zones.

“There’s a set in the northern part of the state, which is related to when the original mountains were built. They were from plate tectonics, when the continents shifted together and built the mountains, there were faults. Those faults still exist in the ground. They’re older, they don’t tend to move as much, but the lines of weakness are still there.

“Then we have things that are in the zone on the eastern part of the state, in the lower part of the state that are related to the opening up of the Atlantic Ocean,” he said. “These faults are still older and run through the lower part of the state. … What we’re seeing now [is] slight readjustments along the faults. Small pops.”

The new interactive website is a virtual companion to SCEMD’s main website, scemd.org, the SC Emergency Manager mobile app and the printed South Carolina Earthquake Guide.

“Earthquake.SC is another tool in the toolbox for people to use when becoming their own emergency managers and being as ready as possible for earthquakes in South Carolina,” Stenson said.

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