Father of slain 22-year-old wants federal prosecutors to handle daughter’s murder case

COLUMBIA — The father of slain 22-year-old Logan Federico — who was murdered in a downtown Columbia neighborhood while visiting with friends at the University of South Carolina — wants to see his daughter’s case handled by federal prosecutors after he said it was failures of the state court system that contributed to his daughter’s killing.

Steve Federico, of Waxhaw, N.C., said if it hadn’t been for record keeping mistakes and plea deals that led to lighter sentencing, the man accused of murdering his daughter likely would have still been in prison. He certainly should have been, he said.

And Federico wants prosecutors to pursue the death penalty, the only punishment he thinks fits the charges against the accused killer, Alexander Dickey.

“He executed Logan,” he told the SC Daily Gazette on Wednesday. “I want him dead.”

Steve Federico said it’s what his daughter would have wanted, too.

“Logan believed in accountability,” he said. “She forgave, she forgot, but she believed people should be held accountable.”

“She wants justifiable vengeance; she deserves it,” Federico added.

On Thursday, the chief prosecutor for Richland County, Democrat Bryon Gipson, released a letter that says he hasn’t yet decided “whether or not to seek the ultimate punishment.” It criticized Attorney General Alan Wilson for suggesting he’d take over if the solicitor doesn’t decide soon.

In response, Wilson announced assigning a senior attorney in his office’s death penalty division to aid Gipson’s review.

A history of crime

Dickey, age 30, is accused of fatally shooting Logan Federico during the early morning hours of May 3 after breaking into the house where she was staying.

According to police, Dickey killed the young woman amid a multi-day crime spree that began with him stealing a car in Richland County and ended with his arrest after he broke into a Lexington County home and set it on fire.

Dickey remains in jail without bond after his indictment June 25 on 12 charges, including murder, burglary and possession of a weapon during a violent crime, according to Richland County court records.

He also is facing 23 charges in Lexington County, including arson, burglary, larceny and banking crimes, according to court records.

It’s unclear whether he intends to plead guilty or not guilty. His public defender, Fielding Pringle, declined to comment to the Gazette.

But it was Dickey’s history of past arrests and convictions that has Steve Federico questioning why Dickey was out of prison in the first place.

Since he turned 18, police have charged him with at least 48 crimes across 14 occasions, according to a criminal record report from the State Law Enforcement Division. Those are all before his charges from May.

That arrest history included 31 felony crimes — mostly breaking into vehicles, but also some theft and burglary. Ten of them were traffic crimes. He was convicted on eight of those felony charges and pled two more down to misdemeanors.

He served three terms in prison: November 2014 to May 2017, April to August 2018, and December 2019 to February 2021, state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Chrysti Shain confirmed.

At age 19, a grand larceny conviction, combined with a conviction for third-degree burglary, landed him a five-year prison sentence, of which he appears to have served half.

A drug charge led to his short stay in 2018. He was 23 years old.

And at age 24, a strong-arm robbery conviction resulted in a four-year sentence, of which he served a little more than one year.

For breaking into a vehicle in 2013 and another 2014 burglary charge, judges assigned him probation.

By reoffending, Dickey broke the terms of his probation on multiple crimes, and a judge could have required him to serve another six years or more of prison time as a result. But that didn’t happen.

Missed information

Then, in 2023, police arrested him for burglary again.

After the prosecutors and Dickey reached a plea deal, a judge had the option of sentencing Dickey to as much as five years in prison. The judge also could have rejected the deal, keeping to the original second-degree burglary charge that comes with penalties up to 10 years.

Instead, the judge ruled the 411 days Dickey spent in jail waiting for his case to proceed was enough time served. He was let out on probation.

The issue, Lexington County’s chief prosecutor told NBC affiliate WIS-TV, was the earlier burglary charges didn’t show up in his criminal history record maintained by SLED, and the plea deal had treated the burglary as a first time for that offense, despite Dickey’s earlier convictions.

Had they known, 11th Circuit Solicitor Rick Hubbard told WIS, his office wouldn’t have struck the deal.

SLED’s explanation was that it never received fingerprints from the 2014 burglary arrest. A receipt of fingerprints is what prompts the agency to add charges to someone’s record, according to spokeswoman Renee Wunderlich.

The state police agency did not respond to the Gazette’s questions on any policy changes since for updating criminal records to prevent similar issues in the future.

‘You pissed off the wrong daddy’

In Steve Federico’s mind, everyone involved played a role. He blames the judge and solicitor for not researching Dickey’s past before approving a plea deal that let him back out into the community.

“Soft on crime is a problem,” he said. “This happened because of that.”

The story garnered national attention this week following his recounting of the crime during a Sept. 29 satellite hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee on Oversight in Charlotte on victims of violent crime.

She was “begging for her life, begging for her hero, her father, me, that couldn’t be there. She was 5 foot 3. She weighed 115 pounds. Bang! Dead. Gone. Why?” Federico said, getting everyone’s attention.

“I could sit down and explain the whole process of how it failed, how South Carolina failed Logan, the lack of communication,” he said. “What y’all did? You woke up a beast. And you pissed off the wrong daddy. And I’m going to put it out there, and I’m not going to be quiet.”

He asked the members of Congress to imagine their own children, asleep after coming home from a night out with friends, when a stranger enters and violently ends their life.

“I promise you, you will be sick and tired of my face and my voice until this gets fixed,” he said. “I will fight until my last breath for my daughter. You need to fight for the rest of our children, the rest of the innocents, and stop protecting the people that keep taking them from us.”

Politicians respond

Video of Federico’s comments, which racked up millions of views on social media, prompted responses from South Carolina politicians, including four Republicans running for governor.

In an email, Wilson issued a statement Wednesday saying he had spoken with the law enforcement agencies and was assured all were working on a plan to prosecute Dickey.

Weighing in on social media, Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette called it a “clear illustration of our failed justice system” and U.S. Rep. Nancy Mace specifically attacked Wilson, accusing him of doing “nothing” to prosecute the case.

U.S. Rep. Ralph Norman called for the impeachment of Gipson, the 5th Circuit solicitor, whom Federico accused of failing to communicate with him after his daughter’s murder.

“As the father of three daughters, my heart goes out to the father failed by a weak system that lets criminals go free,” the Rock Hill Republican said in an email sent out by his campaign and posted on social media.

Gipson issued a statement denying Federico’s accusations. In it, he said both he and his team met with the Federico family and their lawyer to discuss the status of the case within days of Dickey’s arrest. Since then, they’ve been in contact via text and phone calls, including a call as recently as Sept. 11, he said.

Solicitor vs. AG

When asked by the Gazette on Wednesday whether he would seek the death penalty, Gipson’s office declined to comment.

Then on Thursday, he sent out an email criticizing Wilson for his “hints” of taking over the case. Gipson released copies of Wilson’s letter, dated Tuesday, that asks the solicitor to “strongly consider” seeking the death penalty and reply with his intention by Oct. 10.

Gipson contends making “such a determination a mere four months into the case … would set a dangerous precedent.” There must first be a thorough analysis of all the evidence, he wrote in a responding letter also released in Thursday’s email.

So, Wilson sent him some help with that review. He assigned Melody Brown, chief of his office’s death penalty unit, to assist Gipson’s prosecution team. Her extensive experience includes working on the death penalty cases that ultimately ended in the state’s six executions since September 2024, Wilson noted in his own publicly released letter.

Other candidates weighing in include people wanting to replace Wilson as attorney general.

First Circuit Solicitor David Pascoe, who switched parties earlier this year ahead of announcing his bid, said he met with Steve Federico. The “system failed Logan and the Federico family,” he wrote on social media.

What’s next?

Because Dickey used credit cards he stole from Federico, who lived in North Carolina, and others, as well as stealing a car and a gun, the Federicos think there could be enough to get the case moved to federal court, according to Columbia attorney and former state Sen. Dick Harpootlian, who is representing the family.

The U.S. Attorney’s office has more manpower, including a special unit dedicated to death penalty cases, Harpootlian said. Federal prosecutors also don’t face the same backlog of cases Richland County does.

“Not to denigrate the local folks, they just don’t have the same resources,” said Harpootlian, who had Gipson’s job as 5th Circuit solicitor from 1991 to 1995 before two stints as the state Democratic Party chairman. “But ultimately, it’s up to the Trump Justice Department.”

Harpootlian said the family has not approached the state attorney general’s office about taking the case.

Steve Federico said his focus for now is getting justice for his daughter.

But he also wants to pursue legislation governing how the court system handles repeat offenders. And he wants to set up a scholarship fund in his daughter’s name.

Logan Federico had recently decided she wanted to study to be an elementary school teacher, her father said. Two weeks later, she was killed.

“She would have made a difference,” her father said. “That’s what this world needed, and it’s gone.”

“Logan’s death can’t go unnoticed and in vain,” he added. “There’s got to be something positive that comes out of this.”

This story was originally published by the South Carolina Daily Gazette at https://scdailygazette.com/2025/10/02/father-of-slain-22-year-old-wants-federal-prosecutors-to-handle-daughters-murder-case/