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 in the aftermath of Hurricane Florence, drowning two girls in search of mental health remedy trapped in a cage in the back 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 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 only seeking medication for her worry and anxiousness and Green’s family mentioned she was committed to a mental 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 several relations of the women said his resolution 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 lots of time.”

Circuit Court Choose William Seales sentenced Flood to five years in jail on each involuntary manslaughter charge and four years on each 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 towards a guardrail, stopping the ladies 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 line with testimony from the trial streamed by WMBF-TV.

The deputies said they spoke to the ladies and tried to keep them calm for about an hour as the water saved rising earlier than it acquired too dangerous and rescuers might not hear them.

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

Whereas other components like an emergency radio that failed to 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 water.

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

Clements read from Flood's assertion to investigators that he felt like once he was in the water, he couldn't turn round as a result of he may not see the sting of the highway and was frightened about running right into a ditch hidden by the water.

“Possibly it wounded his pride or stubbornness. I don’t know. He pushed ahead into water that was not simply 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 while it was a horrible tragedy, others have been making an attempt to unfairly blame simply the previous deputy as an alternative of the tools issues, the troops that waived them around the barricades and supervisors who knew harmful flooding was starting and sent him regardless that taking the women to the psychological health facilities was not an emergency.

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

Flood did not testify, however before he was sentenced told the decide he tried every thing he could to maintain the women calm as the waters rose and assist was gradual to arrive.

“It was a sequence of mistakes on my part and other those that led me to that point 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 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 nonetheless would not open. The delay in getting assist was costly too. A firefighter testified they had been capable of cut the roof off the van and started engaged on the cage, but the water received higher and sooner and it was too harmful to proceed.

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

“I can forgive, however I can not overlook. Happily, I nonetheless bear in mind my mom as a cheerful lady, a joyful woman who beloved her household," he said. “However you, Mr. Flood, will bear in mind my mother by hearing her screams behind that van."

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