A South Carolina grand jury has returned a murder indictment against a white former police chief in the 2011 killing of an unarmed black man he was trying to arrest.

Richard J. Combs, the former chief of the Eutawville, S.C., police, had previously been charged with official misconduct in the death of the man, Bernard Bailey, and was scheduled to stand trial on Dec. 8 in Orangeburg County. The grand jury signed the murder indictment on Wednesday, and the charge was made public Thursday morning.

The indictment followed decisions by grand juries in Missouri and New York not to charge officers in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, both unarmed black men. Those cases, which are being reviewed by the Justice Department for possible civil rights violations, generated widespread protests.

The indictment in South Carolina was expected. Prosecutors told Mr. Combs’s lawyer in a letter in November 2013 that they planned to seek a murder charge against the former chief, and in a separate letter last month, the authorities said they were merely waiting for a judge to rule on a motion by Mr. Combs to use the state’s Stand Your Ground law as part of his defense.