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 looking for psychological health therapy trapped in a cage within the back was sentenced Thursday to 18 years in jail.

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

Judges ordered Wendy Newton, 45, and Nicolette Green, 43, to be involuntarily committed the day they died in September 2018, but their households mentioned they were not violent. Newton was only searching for medicine for her fear and anxiousness and Inexperienced’s household stated she was committed to a psychological facility at a regular mental well being appointment by a counselor she had by no means seen before.

Flood, 69, was sentenced about half-hour after the verdict and after a number of relations of the women said 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, stubborn man,” Green's sister Donnela Inexperienced-Johnson advised the choose. “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 Court docket Decide William Seales sentenced Flood to 5 years in jail on every involuntary manslaughter charge and four years on each reckless murder charge and ordered the sentences served back-to-back.

The floodwaters swept the police van off its wheels in September 2018 and pinned it against a guardrail, preventing the women from having the ability to get out the sliding door they used to enter the van. Flood and a deputy with him didn't have a key to a second door and there was no emergency escape hatch, in keeping with 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 stored rising before it obtained too harmful and rescuers may now not hear them.

“How terrible should which were to sit down there and wait in your personal dying?” Solicitor Ed Clements said in his closing argument Thursday.

Whereas other components like an emergency radio that didn't notify rescuers of the van's precise location contributed to the deaths, Clements mentioned 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. Freeway 76 just outdoors Nichols, however Flood drove around them after briefly talking to the troopers.

Clements learn from Flood's statement to investigators that he felt like once he was in the water, he couldn't turn round because he might now not see the sting of the freeway and was nervous about operating into a ditch hidden by the water.

“Maybe it wounded his satisfaction or stubbornness. I don’t know. He pushed forward into water that was not just standing in a tall puddle, but it surely was rushing, crossing the guardrail. All of it was the Little Pee Dee River by then,” Clements said.

Flood's lawyer said while it was a terrible tragedy, others had been trying to unfairly blame just the previous deputy instead of the equipment problems, the troops that waived them around the barricades and supervisors who knew dangerous flooding was beginning and sent him though taking the women to the mental well being facilities was not an emergency.

"I ask that you just resist the urge to attempt to give justice to those two women by giving injustice to this good man," defense attorney Jarrett Bouchette stated. “They need to make him a scapegoat for this accident.”

Flood didn't testify, but before he was sentenced instructed the choose he tried everything he might to maintain the women calm because the waters rose and assist was slow to reach.

“It was a sequence of mistakes on my half and other people who led me to that time and I’m sorry for what occurred to the girls,” Flood mentioned.

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

They tried to shoot the locks off the second door, but it still would not open. The delay in getting help was expensive too. A firefighter testified they had been capable of lower the roof off the van and began engaged on the cage, however the water acquired larger and faster and it was too dangerous to proceed.

Newton's son Charles mentioned he hated that Flood needed to learn to follow the rules and use common sense at such a steep worth.

“I can forgive, however I can not forget. Fortuitously, I nonetheless keep in mind my mother as a happy girl, a joyful lady who liked her family," he said. “However you, Mr. Flood, will keep in mind my mom by listening to her screams in the back of that van."

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