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 women in search of mental well being treatment trapped in a cage in 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 homicide.

Judges ordered Wendy Newton, 45, and Nicolette Inexperienced, 43, to be involuntarily committed the day they died in September 2018, however their households stated they weren't violent. Newton was only looking for drugs for her concern and nervousness and Inexperienced’s household said she was dedicated to a mental facility at a daily mental well being appointment by a counselor she had never seen earlier than.

Flood, 69, was sentenced about half-hour after the decision and after several kin of the women mentioned his decision to press ahead with the shortest route left an impossible-to-fix gap of their lives.

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

Circuit Court Choose William Seales sentenced Flood to five years in prison on each involuntary manslaughter cost and four years on every 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 in opposition to 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, according to testimony from the trial streamed by WMBF-TV.

The deputies stated they spoke to the ladies and tried to maintain them calm for about an hour because the water kept rising before it obtained too harmful and rescuers may not hear them.

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

Whereas different elements like an emergency radio that didn't notify rescuers of the van's exact location contributed to the deaths, Clements said the drownings all got here out of Flood’s reckless determination to drive 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) by means of water.

National guard troops put up barricades on U.S. Freeway 76 simply outdoors Nichols, however Flood drove around them after briefly talking to the soldiers.

Clements read from Flood's assertion to investigators that he felt like once he was in the water, he could not turn around because he may not see the sting of the freeway and was fearful about operating right into a ditch hidden by the water.

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

Flood's lawyer mentioned whereas it was a terrible tragedy, others had been trying to unfairly blame just the previous deputy as a substitute of the tools problems, the troops that waived them across the barricades and supervisors who knew harmful flooding was beginning and sent him even though taking the women to the mental well being services was not an emergency.

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

Flood did not testify, but earlier than he was sentenced told the decide he tried everything he could to maintain the women calm as the waters rose and help was gradual to arrive.

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

Flood and the deputy with him, Joshua Bishop, have been ultimately rescued from the highest of the transport van, authorities stated. Bishop will stand trial for two counts of involuntary manslaughter at a later date.

They tried to shoot the locks off the second door, but it surely still wouldn't open. The delay in getting assist was pricey too. A firefighter testified they have been able to cut the roof off the van and started working on the cage, however the water acquired increased and sooner and it was too harmful to proceed.

Newton's son Charles said he hated that Flood needed to study to follow the foundations and use common sense at such a steep value.

“I can forgive, but I cannot overlook. Fortunately, I still remember my mom as a happy girl, a joyful girl who beloved her household," he stated. “However you, Mr. Flood, will keep in mind my mom by hearing her screams in the back of that van."

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