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 girls looking for psychological health treatment trapped in a cage within the back was sentenced Thursday to 18 years in prison.

A Marion County jury discovered 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 Green, 43, to be involuntarily committed the day they died in September 2018, however their families mentioned they weren't violent. Newton was solely looking for medication for her worry and nervousness and Inexperienced’s family stated she was dedicated to a psychological facility at an everyday psychological health appointment by a counselor she had never seen before.

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

“This was a deliberate act set in movement by a pompous, stubborn man,” Inexperienced's sister Donnela Inexperienced-Johnson advised the choose. “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 Courtroom Judge William Seales sentenced Flood to five years in jail on every involuntary manslaughter cost 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 towards a guardrail, stopping the ladies from being able to get out the sliding door they used to enter the van. Flood and a deputy with him did not have a key to a second door and there was no emergency escape hatch, based on testimony from the trial streamed by WMBF-TV.

The deputies mentioned they spoke to the ladies and tried to keep them calm for about an hour because 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 in your personal death?” 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 mentioned the drownings all got here out of Flood’s reckless choice to drive 2 miles (3.2 kilometers) by water.

Nationwide guard troops put up barricades on U.S. Highway 76 simply outside Nichols, but Flood drove round them after briefly talking to the troopers.

Clements learn from Flood's statement to investigators that he felt like as soon as he was within the water, he could not flip round because he might not see the edge of the highway and was worried about working into a ditch hidden by the water.

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

Flood's lawyer mentioned whereas it was a horrible tragedy, others had been trying to unfairly blame simply the previous deputy as an alternative of the gear problems, the troops that waived them around the barricades and supervisors who knew harmful flooding was starting and despatched him although taking the women to the mental well being facilities 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 want to make him a scapegoat for this accident.”

Flood did not testify, but before he was sentenced advised the choose he tried every little thing he could to keep the women calm as the waters rose and assist was sluggish to reach.

“It was a sequence of mistakes on my part and other those who led me to that time and I’m sorry for what happened to the women,” Flood said.

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 two counts of involuntary manslaughter at a later date.

They tried to shoot the locks off the second door, but it surely still 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 working on the cage, however the water bought greater and faster and it was too dangerous to proceed.

Newton's son Charles mentioned he hated that Flood had to learn to observe the rules and use common sense at such a steep value.

“I can forgive, but I cannot forget. Fortuitously, I nonetheless keep in mind my mom as a contented girl, a joyful girl who liked her family," he mentioned. “However you, Mr. Flood, will remember my mom by hearing her screams behind that van."

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