In South Carolina, two women voluntarily sought treatment. A few hours later, they were dead, drowned in the back of a sheriff’s transport van. Their deaths reveal glaring systematic failures.
After the worst of the storm seemed to be over, one of the women, Nicolette Green, attended her regular mental health counseling session on Tuesday. A new therapist decided that she should be committed. She filled out the paperwork, told her daughters that she was going to be okay and sheriff’s deputies prepared to transport her to a hospital nearly two hours from her home.
That evening, Green and another patient, Wendy Newton, who had also voluntarily sought treatment, were on the road to a hospital in the back of a van driven by two sheriff’s deputies. As floodwaters quickly rose, pushing a nearby river over its banks, the van became trapped.
Police scanner audio, obtained by CNN, records the women talking as rescuers attempted to open doors blocked by flood waters. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and the women remained trapped as the floodwaters filled the van’s interior.
The two deputies were rescued from the roof and motored away in a boat. The bodies of the women they were supposed to protect and transport, unable to be reached by divers because of the dark, were left submerged overnight. They were recovered on Wednesday evening.
Deputies driving women from dry ground where they had received counseling into floodwaters was not the result of a single mistake, but a series of seemingly systematic failures made with few precautions and little oversight.
It was no secret that flooding from Hurricane Florence was predicted — President Trump, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, law enforcement, Gov. Henry McMaster, R-S.C., and just about everyone else had been issuing warnings about it for days. That flooding would cause inland rivers to overflow their banks is a warning that law enforcement had been consistently explaining to residents.
For sheriff’s deputies, whose counterparts were likely among those giving warnings, to have ignored those warnings or to not have bothered to check their route before setting off is both neglectful and reckless.
That they weren’t required to or simply ignored a requirement to check their planned route in an area that was in a state of emergency shows not just personal error, but systematic error — a protocol that either doesn’t exist or was rarely enforced.
More personally damning, however, is that it was also no secret that the road the van ended up on was dangerous. It was reportedly blocked off due to flooding, a warning that the driver seems to have ignored. Even then, when they saw water on the road, they should have turned back. It is, of course, law enforcement officers who warn civilian drivers about the danger of even a small amount of rushing water on roadways.
When citizens entrust themselves and their loved ones to the state for care, the state has an obligation to help them and must take appropriate action to do so. That the failure to follow or a total lack of precautions in a clearly dangerous area resulted in the deaths of two women in the state’s care is unacceptable.
Hopefully their deaths will galvanize change and a review of protocols for transporting patients in dangerous situations. It shouldn’t have taken a tragedy, however, to prompt law enforcement to keep the people in their care safe.
