Ex-deputy gets 18 years after detainees drown in locked van

COLUMBIA, S.C. -- A deputy in South Carolina whose police van was swept away by floodwaters within the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, drowning two girls searching for psychological health therapy trapped in a cage within the again was sentenced Thursday to 18 years in jail.

A Marion County jury discovered former Horry County deputy Stephen Flood responsible of two counts of involuntary manslaughter and two counts of reckless homicide.

Judges ordered Wendy Newton, 45, and Nicolette Green, 43, to be involuntarily committed the day they died in September 2018, however their families stated they were not violent. Newton was solely looking for medicine for her concern and anxiety and Inexperienced’s family said she was dedicated to a psychological facility at an everyday psychological health appointment by a counselor she had by no means seen earlier than.

Flood, 69, was sentenced about half-hour after the verdict and after several family members of the ladies mentioned his choice to press forward with the shortest route left an impossible-to-fix gap of their lives.

“This was a deliberate act set in motion by a pompous, cussed man,” Inexperienced's sister Donnela Green-Johnson told the judge. “He abused the trust my sister, Nikki, Wendy and the state of South Carolina entrusted him with. And for what? To save lots of time.”

Circuit Courtroom Judge William Seales sentenced Flood to five years in prison on every involuntary manslaughter charge and four years on every reckless homicide cost and ordered the sentences served back-to-back.

The floodwaters swept the police van off its wheels in September 2018 and pinned it in opposition to a guardrail, stopping the ladies from with the ability to get out the sliding door they used to enter the van. Flood and a deputy with him did not have a key to a second door and there was no emergency escape hatch, based on testimony from the trial streamed by WMBF-TV.

The deputies stated they spoke to the women and tried to keep them calm for about an hour because the water saved rising earlier than it got too harmful and rescuers could no longer hear them.

“How awful should that have been to sit there and wait for your personal dying?” Solicitor Ed Clements said in his closing argument Thursday.

While other factors like an emergency radio that did not notify rescuers of the van's exact location contributed to the deaths, Clements stated the drownings all came out of Flood’s reckless determination to drive 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) by way of water.

Nationwide guard troops put up barricades on U.S. Highway 76 just exterior Nichols, but Flood drove round them after briefly speaking to the soldiers.

Clements read from Flood's statement to investigators that he felt like as soon as he was within the water, he could not flip around because he might not see the sting of the freeway and was nervous about running right into a ditch hidden by the water.

“Possibly it wounded his delight or stubbornness. I don’t know. He pushed ahead into water that was not simply standing in a tall puddle, but it was speeding, crossing the guardrail. All of it was the Little Pee Dee River by then,” Clements stated.

Flood's lawyer stated whereas it was a horrible tragedy, others have been trying to unfairly blame just the former deputy as a substitute of the tools problems, the troops that waived them across the barricades and supervisors who knew dangerous flooding was beginning and despatched him though taking the ladies to the mental well being services was not an emergency.

"I ask that you just resist the urge to try to give justice to those two girls by giving injustice to this good man," protection legal professional Jarrett Bouchette stated. “They wish to make him a scapegoat for this accident.”

Flood didn't testify, but before he was sentenced told the decide he tried every little thing he could to keep the ladies calm as the waters rose and help was slow to arrive.

“It was a sequence of errors on my part and different people that led me to that time and I’m sorry for what happened to the women,” Flood stated.

Flood and the deputy with him, Joshua Bishop, have been finally rescued from the top of the transport van, authorities said. Bishop will stand trial for 2 counts of involuntary manslaughter at a later date.

They tried to shoot the locks off the second door, however it nonetheless would not open. The delay in getting assist was expensive too. A firefighter testified they were in a position to lower the roof off the van and began engaged on the cage, but the water got larger and sooner and it was too harmful to continue.

Newton's son Charles said he hated that Flood needed to be taught to follow the foundations and use widespread sense at such a steep price.

“I can forgive, but I can not neglect. Fortuitously, I nonetheless remember my mother as a cheerful lady, a joyful woman who liked her household," he said. “However you, Mr. Flood, will keep in mind my mother by hearing her screams behind that van."

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Follow Jeffrey Collins on Twitter at https://twitter.com/JSCollinsAP.