A South Carolina high school football game has been “suspended indefinitely” after an incident in the stands caused an evacuation on Friday night.

Stratford and Summerville were playing a season-opener at Statford Stadium in Goose Creek, South Carolina.

Attendees of the game were asked to evacuate the stadium to their vehicles after the first half ended. Summerville led Stratford 28-14.

The game was “suspended indefinitely.”

“The safety and well being of our student-athletes, fans and community members is our top priority,” Stratford’s football program said in a statement released late Friday night.

Police told the Post and Courier in South Carolina a group of students reported an individual with a weapon and intent to use it.

Goose Creek police said in a statement police that a 911 call claimed multiple shots were fired during the game, but that ultimately no guns went off.

“Nobody heard shots. There are no shell casings. There’s no nothing,” Goose Creek Police Chief L.J Roscoe told the Post and Courier. “We stopped the game to try to figure out what happened and get to the bottom of it.”

Stratford plays Daniel at home on Thursday at 7:30 p.m. (eastern time) while Summerville plays South Florence on Saturday, Aug. 30.

This is a developing story.

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— Andy Buhler | andy@scorebooklive.com | @sblivesports

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina has set a Sept. 20 date to put inmate Freddie Eugene Owens to death in what would be the state’s first execution in more than 13 years.

South Carolina was once one of the busiest states for executions, but for years had had trouble obtaining lethal injection drugs due to pharmaceutical companies’ concerns that they would have to disclose that they had sold the drugs to officials.

The state Legislature has since passed a law allowing officials to keep lethal injection drug suppliers secret and, in July, the state Supreme Court cleared the way to restart executions.

Owens, who killed a store clerk in Greenville in 1997, will likely have the choice to die by lethal injection, electrocution or by the newly added option of a firing squad. A Utah inmate in 2010 was the last person to have been executed by a firing squad in the U.S., according to the nonprofit Death Penalty Information Center.

The prisons director has five days to confirm that all three execution methods will be available. He must also give Owens’s lawyers proof that the lethal injection drug is stable and correctly mixed, according to the high court’s 2023 interpretation of the state’s secrecy law on executions that helped reopen the door to South Carolina’s death chamber.

Owens, 46, will then have about a week to let the state know how he wishes to be killed. If he makes no choice, the state will send him to the electric chair by default.

The justices didn’t specify how much information has to be released but they have promised a swift ruling if an inmate challenged the details in the disclosure.

South Carolina used to use a mix of three drugs, but now will use one drug, the sedative pentobarbital, for lethal injections in a protocol similar to executions carried out by the federal government.

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