911 call released in fatal stabbing

MOUNT PLEASANT -- Hysterical shoppers screamed as a woman knelt on the floor in Walmart, desperately trying to stop the bleeding while cradling the young man's head and listening for breath.

"Somebody's got to hurry up," a man says to a 911 operator from his cellphone. "They've got to hurry! hurry! hurry!"

Mount Pleasant police on Friday released to The Post and Courier the 911 recordings for the shockingly public Sept. 28 killing of 20-year-old David "D.J." Moultrie, a Walmart employee who was stabbed to death in front of the store.

While the number of witnesses remains unknown, several people -- employees and shoppers alike -- called for help or tried to render aid to the wounded man.

One man had been inside McDonald's, he tells the operator, when he heard a pop. He saw a man on the ground, and the blood.

The caller didn't know if the store employee had been shot or stabbed. But as he dialed rescue workers, there from the Walmart Supercenter entrance, he knew this: "I think he's dying!"

"You think he's dying?" the operator asks, her surprise audible.

People don't just get stabbed to death at retail stores -- especially with as many people around as there were that day at the Market at Oakland in the suburbs of northern Mount Pleasant.

Another operator asks, "Is the man is awake? Breathing? Alert?"

The woman applying pressure to the wound yells frantically in the background: "What's taking EMS so long?"

Then the crowd becomes so loud that operators barely can hear.

Employees call in, too, knowing little about what happened.

"David, our cart pusher, is the one who got shot in front of the building," one woman tells an operator.

Another caller asks her manager for more information while on the line. Her manager just repeats, "Call 911. Call 911."

It's too late. Moultrie dies, and police arrest an 18-year-old Awendaw man named Darius Green on murder charges.

Officials say the young men had an argument, that Green pulled out a sharp object and stabbed Moultrie. Moultrie stumbled into the store and collapsed.

Reach Allyson Bird at 937-5594 or on Twitter at @allysonjbird.