Ex-deputy will get 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 ladies searching for mental health treatment trapped in a cage in the again was sentenced Thursday to 18 years in prison.

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 families said they were not violent. Newton was solely in search of drugs for her worry and nervousness and Green’s household said she was committed to a psychological facility at a regular mental health appointment by a counselor she had never seen earlier than.

Flood, 69, was sentenced about 30 minutes after the verdict and after a number of kinfolk of the ladies stated his decision to press forward with the shortest route left an impossible-to-fix hole of their lives.

“This was a deliberate act set in movement by a pompous, stubborn man,” Inexperienced's sister Donnela Inexperienced-Johnson told 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 Court Choose William Seales sentenced Flood to 5 years in prison on every involuntary manslaughter cost and 4 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, preventing the women 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, in response to 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 as the water stored rising before it obtained too harmful and rescuers might not hear them.

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

Whereas other factors like an emergency radio that failed to notify rescuers of the van's exact location contributed to the deaths, Clements stated the drownings all got here out of Flood’s reckless determination to drive 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) by water.

National guard troops put up barricades on U.S. Highway 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 as soon as he was within the water, he could not flip around because he could not see the sting of the freeway and was fearful about operating right into a ditch hidden by the water.

“Possibly it wounded his delight 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 horrible tragedy, others have been attempting to unfairly blame simply the former deputy as an alternative of the tools problems, the troops that waived them across the barricades and supervisors who knew dangerous flooding was starting and despatched him even though taking the women to the mental well being services was not an emergency.

"I ask that you simply resist the urge to try to give justice to these two ladies by giving injustice to this good man," protection attorney 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 thing he might to maintain the ladies calm because the waters rose and help was sluggish to arrive.

“It was a sequence of errors on my half and other folks that led me to that time and I’m sorry for what occurred to the ladies,” Flood said.

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 two counts of involuntary manslaughter at a later date.

They tried to shoot the locks off the second door, however it nonetheless wouldn't open. The delay in getting help was expensive too. A firefighter testified they were able to reduce the roof off the van and started engaged on the cage, however the water got higher and quicker and it was too harmful to continue.

Newton's son Charles mentioned he hated that Flood had to study to follow the foundations and use frequent sense at such a steep value.

“I can forgive, however I cannot overlook. Luckily, I nonetheless bear in mind my mom as a cheerful girl, a joyful woman who loved her family," he said. “But you, Mr. Flood, will remember my mother by listening to her screams behind that van."

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