Driver arrested, passenger airlifted to hospital after boat crash in Beaufort Co.
A 55-year-old man was arrested for allegedly boating under the influence and crashing his vessel in a Beaufort County waterway over Memorial Day weekend. A passenger in the boat received a “severe head injury” and was airlifted to the hospital, according to police.
William Edward Peebles, of Beaufort, was charged the morning of May 23 with BUI resulting in great bodily injury, according to inmate records. The reported severe injuries upgrade the charge to a felony under South Carolina law.
The crash occurred as Peebles was operating a boat “in the nighttime hours” of May 22 on Chowan Creek, an offshoot of the Beaufort River that runs between Cat Island and southwest St. Helena Island, his arrest warrant says.
Officers with the S.C. Department of Natural Resources responded to the collision site and claimed Peebles was allegedly “materially and appreciably impaired,” according to the warrant. It was not immediately clear whether Peebles submitted to field sobriety tests or a breathalyzer.
The passenger with a head injury was airlifted to Memorial Health University Medical Center in Savannah, a DNR officer wrote in the warrant.
Peebles was released from the Beaufort County jail about six hours after his arrest on a $100,000 cash bond, judicial records show.
Additional details about the crash, including its precise location, what the boat crashed into and the condition of the injured passenger, were not provided by DNR in time for publication.
Serious, fatal boat crashes in Beaufort County
Serious and fatal boat crashes are not uncommon in Beaufort County, where commercial and recreational boating is a pastime for thousands of residents.
About 50% of the county is made up of water and wetlands, and over 10,000 boats and jet skis were registered in the area as of 2024, according to a DNR database.
Last June, a husband and wife from Sun City died after the sport fishing boat they were passengers in struck a day marker on Skull Creek, which runs to the west of Hilton Head. The vessel overturned, trapped the couple underwater and caused them to drown, while two other passengers in the boat survived. Those fatalities were among the first boating-related deaths in Beaufort County since the Beaufort-area boat crash in 2019 that killed 19-year-old Mallory Beach.
This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 1:37 PM.
