Man convicted in near-fatal 2021 shooting at Hilton Head ‘Barmuda Triangle’ restaurant spot
An Okatie man was convicted Tuesday for a near-fatal 2021 shooting at a Hilton Head nightlife hotspot.
Ray Altacho, 27, was sentenced to 13 years in prison for three counts of attempted murder and two counts of illegal weapon possession, the 14th Circuit Solicitor’s Office announced in a Tuesday press release.
Beaufort County Judge Robert J. Bonds rejected the defense’s request for immunity under South Carolina’s “stand your ground” law, which grants victims the right to defend themselves with deadly force.
The man’s sentence with the SC Department of Corrections (SCDC) will be followed by three years of probation.
Tuesday’s conviction comes more than two years after the Jan. 18, 2021, shooting, when Altacho fired five shots into a car with his former girlfriend and two other men inside. One of the men was struck in the arm by two bullets as he covered the woman in the driver’s seat. The woman sped away, crashing her car nearby on New Orleans Road before a passenger called 911.
The car had been leaving the Boardroom, a newly reopened live music venue and part of a south-island bar district known locally as the “Barmuda Triangle.” The venue reopened its doors earlier this month — 18 months after it lost its insurance during legal battles related to a May 2021 triple-fatality crash on the Hilton Head bridge.
All three of the car’s passengers in the January 2021 shooting identified Altacho as the suspect, who was arrested by the U.S. Marshal’s Service three weeks later in Florence, the press release says. Beaufort County investigators found the man’s cell phone on the ground of the parking lot where the attack took place. Surveillance footage showed him following his ex-girlfriend’s car minutes before the shooting.
Although the male passenger was the only one shot, police and prosecutors agreed that Altacho intended to kill his former partner. First Assistant Solicitor Mary Jordan Lempesis, who prosecuted the case, said the shooting was “clearly an act of intimate-partner violence.”
Court records date Altacho’s first conviction back to March 2013, when he received a yearlong SCDC sentence after pleading guilty to first-degree burglary and a half-dozen counts of larceny. Police had accused him the year before of breaking into a house and 15 cars during a string of thefts in Bluffton’s Mill Creek neighborhood.
Altacho has also been convicted on charges of domestic violence, the Solicitor’s Office said.
Altacho had not yet appeared in SCDC’s inmate roster as of Wednesday evening.
When we publish mugshots
The Island Packet and Beaufort Gazette publishes police booking photos, or mugshots, in the following instances:
In situations where a public figure or someone in a position of public trust is arrested
In cases where there is an immediate and widespread threat to public safety
In cases where the arrested person is accused of a crime reporters have evidence to believe involved numerous, unknown victims
Reporters will avoid using mugshots as lead images for online articles in order to limit their circulation on social media, except in cases where the public is served by the immediate identification of the accused. Reporters and editors may use discretion in situations that don’t meet the criteria outlined in this policy but still present a compelling reason to publish a mugshot.
