Police release new details on woman found shot to death in car

SHALLOTTE, N.C. (WECT) - Shallotte Police have released the name of the woman found shot to death in her car on the side of the road March 25. The victim has been identified as 25-year-old Porsha Marie Lloyd. She had been reported missing by her family in Mebane shortly before she died.

Police are still waiting for results from the State Crime Lab before they close the case, but are investigating the possibility the gunshot wound was self-inflicted. The gun authorities found in the vehicle with Lloyd was registered in her name. Investigators say concerning text messages Lloyd sent to her family members prompted them to file the missing persons report.

Shallotte Police officers were first alerted to an issue with Lloyd at 4:30 in the morning on March 25, after getting reports of a vehicle stuck in a ditch up the road from West Brunswick High School. An officer arrived and found Lloyd and her half sister, 24-year-old Destiny Scott, inside the car. At the time, the women said they were okay, and had swerved off the road to avoid a deer. They told the officer they had already called their insurance company and did not need any help. After about 30 minutes, the officer left.

Two hours later, a garbage truck driver pulled over and found Lloyd dead in the backseat with a gunshot wound to her head, and Scott so intoxicated she was nearly unconscious. Scott was taken to the hospital by ambulance.

At the time the Shallotte Police Officer first made contact with Lloyd, the DCI Network that might have alerted them to her status as a missing person was down. Shallotte Police Detective Cory McLamb says that computer database goes offline for maintenance between four and five in the morning every day. Even if they had checked, McLamb says her name may not have shown up in their system unless the family specifically mentioned that she may be in Brunswick County. Typically, McLamb says the BOLO (Be on the Lookout) order only goes out to the counties immediately surrounding where a person is reported missing.

McLamb added that it is not standard procedure to run each person an officer encounters through the database, nor are they under any legal obligation to do so.

However, dispatchers at the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office requested a description of the vehicle and the license plate number before the officer cleared the scene. That’s done on a routine basis to save dispatchers from inadvertently being dispatched to the same scene multiple times. The sheriff’s office says the officer provided the wrong tag number, so it didn’t flag that the woman driving the car was missing. Had the right tag number been provided, the Brunswick County Sheriff’s Office says dispatchers would have been alerted that the driver had been reported as “missing, endangered, suicidal.”

Authorities say Scott remains hospitalized, but is not suffering from any physical injuries.

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