Beaufort Co. boat crash, secrecy and a toxic trash mountain top 2019 Lowcountry stories
In the very early, foggy hours of Feb. 24, five boaters — most of them still on the teenage side of adulthood — found themselves on the banks of Archers Creek, a narrow waterway just under the Parris Island causeway, wet, injured, stunned, crying and desperately screaming the name of their missing friend into the darkness.
It would be a week before Mallory Beach’s body would be discovered, five miles from the bridge they had crashed into at a high speed.
The boating death of 19-year-old Hampton County woman deeply touched readers of The Island Packet and The Beaufort Gazette, who not only expressed heartbreak for those who loved Beach, but— as weeks continued to pass without charges filed — increasing outrage and suspicion that favoritism for a politically and legally powerful family might be hindering the investigation of the crash that killed her.
Since the crash, a team of reporters at the Packet and the Gazette has closely followed the case in an effort to hold investigating agencies and the judicial system accountable and to bring light to a tragedy that from most angles, appears to have been preventable.
The boat Beach had been riding in was owned by Hampton County attorney Richard Alexander Murdaugh and allegedly driven by Murdaugh’s son Paul, who was 19 at the time.
From 1920 to 2005, three generations of Murdaugh men consecutively served as solicitor for the 14th Circuit — in effect, deciding which cases would get prosecuted in Beaufort County, which merited plea deals and which would be dropped altogether.
First-responders at the crash site reported that the surviving boaters appeared to be “grossly intoxicated.” South Carolina Department of Natural Resources, the lead investigating agency in the case, said Paul’s father and grandfather arrived at Beaufort Memorial Hospital soon after the crash and prevented investigators from interviewing any of the boaters.
Though Beach’s boyfriend, who was also on the boat that morning, unequivocally identified Paul as the driver, according to Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office deputies, reports began to emerge that investigators were unsure about who was driving.
Nearly two months after the crash, however, Paul Murdaugh was indicted by a Beaufort County grand jury on one charge of felony boating under the influence resulting in death and two charges of felony boating under the influence.
Since that time and as Murdaugh has moved through the judicial system, questions continue to be raised about whether he is being treated differently from others facing felony BUI charges.
In any given year, the occurrence of a boating death would be among the most-read news reported in Beaufort County.
The involvement of the Murdaugh family — and the related backlash and anger from residents of Beaufort and Hampton counties, who worry the incident will be swept under the rug — has heightened interest in the case, putting the boating crash at the top of the list for the most read and important stories of 2019 in Beaufort County.
Reporters and editors of the Packet and the Gazette also put the following stories on that list:
School bond referendum
Two failed attempts in 2016 and 2018 to win voter approval for hundreds of millions of dollars in repairs and new school building meant a lot was riding on Beaufort County school board’s decision to hold yet another bond referendum this past fall.
The public had previously withheld the money in large part because of mistrust in Beaufort County School District leadership and as a result of the Board of Education’s mishandling of former Superintendent Jeff Moss — whose five-year tenure included a guilty plea to state ethics violations and being named in an ongoing FBI investigation related to the construction of two Bluffton schools as well his connection to a controversial for-profit education-technology brokerage firm.
After Moss’ resignation in 2018, the election of a mostly new board and the hiring this year of new superintendent Frank Rodriguez, the board decided to again take up the cause.
It had been 11 years since the last successful school bond referendum had passed in the county. In the meantime, complaints continue to mount of deteriorating conditions at several county schools and of overcrowding due to fast-paced growth in Bluffton.
This time around, the bond referendum was supported by a nonprofit advocacy group that lobbied on its behalf; and it was endorsed — something that didn’t happen the previous two times — by municipal and county leaders, as well as a number of civic groups.
In a landslide vote Nov. 5, Beaufort County residents approved $345 million in a bond referendum, and construction has already started at May River High School and River Ridge Academy in Bluffton. Construction on a new Robert Smalls International Academy in Burton is expected to begin in early 2021.
‘Trash mountain’
In 2017, the Packet and the Gazette exposed a loophole in an outdated state law that allowed for Able Contracting on Schinger Avenue in Okatie to accumulate what, at the time, was a 90-foot pile of debris.
In 2015, the pile, sometimes referred to as “trash mountain,” had caught on fire. It took firefighters 31 hours and more than a million gallons of water to extinguish the flames.
Though state lawmakers enacted stricter permitting requirements for such facilities in 2018, Able Contracting once again found itself battling a debris fire this past spring.
In July, the Packet and the Gazette again reported on the pile, which had been on fire since at least early June, when the state Department of Health and Environmental Control said it began receiving complaints from area residents and business owners, who said the smell and the smoke were affecting their quality of life and causing them health problems.
DHEC set up air-quality monitoring stations in the area, which found particulate levels at more than twice what is considered “hazardous.”
By early August, the 31 residents of Schinger Avenue had to be evacuated. Soon after, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, which declared Able Contracting a federal Superfund site, began its $4.5 million cleanup of the site.
Two months later, Schinger Avenue residents were able to return to their homes. In September, DHEC ordered Able Contracting to close.
Nearly 26,000 tons of debris had to be removed to area landfills, and the site’s owner has been tasked with finishing the cleanup.
State and federal agencies are expected to seek reimbursement from “responsible parties,” but have not yet named who they consider that to be.
Workforce crisis
Lines of cars snake around a fast-food restaurant. “Now Hiring” signs are more common than sea gulls. Rush-hour traffic on U.S. 278 is more sluggish.
Signs of a workforce crisis in Beaufort County increased throughout 2019.
A number of businesses, including a McDonald’s restaurant, had to cut hours because they did not have enough employees.
A short-staffed Hilton Head Island eatery was so slammed one night that seven customers dove in and started taking orders, busing tables and washing dishes.
High housing costs and a lack of public transportation in Bluffton and on Hilton Head are fueling the crisis as more and more businesses enter the market.
“There’s no place for everybody to live,” a Hilton Head restaurant owner said. “It happens all the time, and it’s hell.”
In February, a consultant to the Town of Hilton Head Island delivered the jarring news:
Hilton Head needs 200 new units each year — specifically designed to house the workforce, with salaries between $15,000 and $70,000 a year depending on the industry.
“(That’s) the range where the private sector has not delivered housing that is affordable,” the consultant said.
The town is now scrambling to locate areas where smaller, less-expensive housing units could be built.
But despite all the talk, the market continues to build residences workers cannot afford, while sometimes seeking credit for building “workforce housing.”
Historic move at Parris Island
Women have been training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island in Port Royal since 1949, but not until 2019 did it see this historic new twist — its first gender-integrated boot camp class.
“I see this as the elimination of a big barrier to inclusion of women in the Marine Corps,” said retired Lt. Col. Kate Germano, who once commanded Parris Island’s all-female 4th Recruit Training Battalion.
“My hope is that having women and men train side by side will eliminate a lot of the assumptions about what men and women are capable of doing,” Germano said.
In March, India Company, 3rd Recruit Training Battalion graduated five platoons of males alongside one platoon of females.
Women have traditionally trained in their own battalion, but the new tactic saw women sharing the same barracks with men in a Marine company. Each platoon had its own squad bay for sleeping, showering and individual training, and training activities such as close-order drills and martial arts were done at the platoon level.
The Marine Corps, which came under pressure as the only U.S. service branch without a coed boot camp, said as the new year began that it would assess the new models as it continually evaluates recruit training.
In October, a third partially gender-integrated class brought male and female platoons side-by-side for morning physical training, work on the obstacle course and classroom study, the Marine Times reported.
Hurricane Dorian
Over the past four years, Beaufort County residents have had to navigate a new way of life, one that includes not just preparing for the possibility of a hurricane but actually experiencing one.
Or four of them, as it turns out.
Though coastal living has always meant being watchful of these powerful storms, 2016’s Hurricane Matthew kicked off three more back-to-back years of the governor calling for evacuations of our area ahead of storms.
In the days leading up to Hurricane Dorian, which wholly obliterated parts of the Bahamas on its march northward and passed us in full force early Sept. 5, emergency management officials and first-responders worried that many residents had become apathetic to the danger and chose not heed the call for evacuations.
County Coroner Ed Allen warned that “there will be death.” The bodies, he said, would have to remain in our homes until the storm had passed.
Though the storm brought winds as high as 67 mph on Hilton Head Island and 92 mph just six miles off the coast of Fripp Island, overall damage was considered minimal.
About 80 trees were removed from public roads and 22,000 homes reported power outages. And no storm-related deaths were reported in the county.
Beaufort County Council
The push in 2018 by a few Beaufort County Council members to put former interim county administrator Josh Gruber in the full-time administrator role continued to make headlines this year as even more details emerged about how council leadership has been operating behind the scenes, away from public scrutiny.
Emails, contracts and reports obtained by the Packet and the Gazette in 2019 revealed a county plagued by mismanagement, as well as heavy-handed council members, led by now-chairman Stu Rodman, who disregard parliamentary procedure, overstep their roles with county employees and work to orchestrate outcomes through private channels.
Council also found itself in the news for its ongoing lack of transparency, Rodman’s attempts to keep a citizen known for his criticism of council from speaking during public-comment periods; and Rodman’s threat of not speaking to the press in retaliation for an opinion column that criticized council.
In June, rejected the newspapers’ Freedom of Information Act request for the results of an independent investigation into a $24,000 contract Gruber had written for himself before his last day in the summer of 2018 — a contract that was approved by Keaveny. The papers later obtained a copy of the report and published the results.
Later, the county appeared to hinder the release of other contracts granted to former county employees by inflating the cost to fulfill another FOIA request from the newspapers.
After the papers published a story about the $655 cost of the FOIA, the county — now under the leadership of administrator Ashley Jacobs, who started in April — agreed to produce the documents for free. While doing so, Jacobs, who has continued to make substantive changes to county operations, also pledged to end old practices that prohibit the free flow of public information.
Along those lines, county councilman Mike Covert, who represents parts of Bluffton, was made chairman of a committee tasked with improving transparency and the public’s access to information in the county.
However, as the year ends, it remains to be seen whether meaningful change can take hold when some believe business as usual will continue on council.
Hilton Head airport’s new era
After decades of rancorous debate about airport expansion on Hilton Head Island, a Delta Air Lines jet landed to a hero’s welcome in May.
The 69-seat Embraer ERJ-170 glided under an arch of water sprayed from a Beaufort County firefighting truck, and a new era without small, turboprop planes began.
Last year’s $27.5 million expansion of the runway — with nearby buildings and trees scrapped as it stretched from 4,300 feet to 5,000 feet — changed everything as this summer’s tourism season brought airlines running.
In the first half of the year, 96,000 passengers came and went aboard larger and louder jets through a suddenly congested county terminal. That was a 236% passenger increase over the previous year.
Delta, with four seasonal daily flights to Atlanta and other flights to New York, was joined by United Airlines offering seasonal flights to Washington, D.C., Chicago and New York, and American Airlines offering seasonal flights to Chicago, Dallas Fort Worth and Philadelphia.
Noise complaints from the public were muted, and the Town of Hilton Head Island negotiated with a Gullah church at the end of the runway for a possible move.
Airport officials immediately said they hope to expand the terminal and parking to keep pace, announcing in May a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Transportation for “infrastructure investment.”
May River degradation
The chickens are coming home to roost in booming Bluffton.
The town that has long said its top three priorities are the May River, the May River and the May River has a pollution problem that has long been forewarned.
A study released late this year showed a bacteria level at one monitoring station in the May River up 3,150 percent in less than 20 years. The study produced by the University of South Carolina Beaufort for the town and county found fecal coliform levels in the river 15% to 16% greater in 2017 than in 1999.
The river still produces what locals believe are the best oysters in the world, but the town, county and state face a growing challenge to keep it that way. In a town that has already grown by 874% since 2000, this year saw new development that was approved long ago sprouting up all over town, all of it adding stress on the tidal river that defines Bluffton.
A national park
Beaufort County’s importance in American history gained new national recognition in 2019.
The county is now home to a national park. It is expected to help the world reexamine the turbulent years following the Civil War, when freedom from slavery came early in this county.
The Reconstruction Era National Historical Park was created as part of a sweeping public lands bill signed by President Donald Trump in March. The bill redefines a Beaufort County national monument created in 2017 that includes Darrah Hall and Brick Church on St. Helena Island, a former firehouse building in downtown Beaufort, and Camp Saxton and the Emancipation Oak on the site of Naval Hospital Beaufort in Port Royal.
The distinction means more national name recognition for the area, Beaufort Mayor Billy Keyserling said. And the park should bring more visitors here.
The park designation will allow more local sites on St. Helena and downtown Beaufort to be included, including the full campus of Penn Center.
The bill also establishes a Reconstruction Era network that would allow nearby sites like Mitchelville on Hilton Head Island to fall under the National Park Service umbrella without being part of the actual national park.
