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 searching for mental well being therapy trapped in a cage in the back was sentenced Thursday to 18 years in prison.

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

Judges ordered Wendy Newton, 45, and Nicolette Inexperienced, 43, to be involuntarily dedicated the day they died in September 2018, however their families stated they were not violent. Newton was only in search of medicine for her fear and anxiousness and Green’s household stated she was dedicated to a mental facility at an everyday psychological well being appointment by a counselor she had by no means seen earlier than.

Flood, 69, was sentenced about half-hour after the decision and after a number of kin of the ladies stated 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 instructed the decide. “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 jail 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 against 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 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 said they spoke to the ladies and tried to maintain them calm for about an hour as the water stored rising before it acquired too harmful and rescuers may now not hear them.

“How terrible should that have been to sit down there and wait for your own death?” Solicitor Ed Clements stated in his closing argument Thursday.

While other factors like an emergency radio that did not notify rescuers of the van's actual location contributed to the deaths, Clements said the drownings all got here out of Flood’s reckless resolution to drive 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) by means of water.

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

Clements learn from Flood's assertion to investigators that he felt like once he was in the water, he couldn't turn around because he could no longer see the edge of the freeway and was frightened about operating right into a ditch hidden by the water.

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

Flood's lawyer stated whereas it was a horrible tragedy, others were attempting 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 starting and despatched him though taking the ladies to the psychological well being services was not an emergency.

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

Flood didn't testify, but before he was sentenced advised the choose he tried everything he may to maintain the women calm as the waters rose and help was sluggish to reach.

“It was a sequence of errors on my half and other those who led me to that point and I’m sorry for what happened to the girls,” Flood mentioned.

Flood and the deputy with him, Joshua Bishop, had been ultimately rescued from the highest 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, nevertheless it nonetheless would not open. The delay in getting help was expensive too. A firefighter testified they have been capable of reduce the roof off the van and started engaged on the cage, but the water got greater and quicker and it was too dangerous to continue.

Newton's son Charles said he hated that Flood had to learn to observe the principles and use common sense at such a steep price.

“I can forgive, but I can not overlook. Thankfully, I still keep in mind my mom as a cheerful girl, a joyful woman who cherished her household," he said. “However you, Mr. Flood, will keep in mind my mother 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.