By CNN Wire Staff
ORANGEBURG, S.C. — South Carolina authorities will bring murder charges against a woman who admitted she suffocated two of her children, who were found in a car submerged in a river Monday, Orangeburg County Sheriff Larry Williams said in a news conference Tuesday.
Shaquan Duley, 29, told police she smothered her toddler sons at the Trumps Inn motel in Orangeburg by placing her hands over their mouths, Williams said. He added that the children were dead before she put them in their car seats and drove them to the river while “trying to find a way to discard the bodies.”
Williams said Duley is not a hardened criminal, but an angry, upset, unemployed woman who felt she had no way to support her kids.
“She just wanted to get rid of the children, as sad as it may be,” Williams said.
Investigators had previously identified “some issues that needed to be unraveled” in the case, he said earlier, but as Duley was interviewed throughout the evening, “we discovered some other issues that we had great concern (about).”
Williams told CBS he thought from the outset “we had a deceptive mother” and that investigators shared his “gut feeling” that something wasn’t right. Williams said Monday the case had “a stench of foul play.”
Duley currently faces charges of leaving the scene of an accident. Divers found the bodies of her two sons, ages 1 and 2, in her Chrysler sedan in the Edisto River near a boat landing after state troopers responded to a report of a car accident early Monday. The bodies were sent to the county coroner for autopsies.
Williams said Monday he couldn’t confirm reports that the key was still in the car’s ignition, but he said the car apparently was in neutral.
He added Duley didn’t appear wet, saying, “She didn’t have any evidence that she had been submerged in the water.”
The car went off the boat ramp that is about 10 yards off the road’s shoulder and sits at a 90-degree angle to the road.
Duley told authorities she was driving down the road and lost control of the vehicle where the boat ramp was, Williams told HLN’s Nancy Grace.
However, he added, “There’s no evidence that she ran off the road at any time.”
Duley walked nearly a mile before calling for help, telling authorities she flagged down a motorist to borrow a cell phone to summon help, Williams said. Police are trying to track down that individual.
But “she could have gone to a closer residence” to call authorities, Williams told CBS.
Ramona Milhouse told CNN she lives next to the boat landing, and her house and a neighbor’s house are clearly visible from the road. She said she was at home around the time Duley told authorities she lost control of her car.
“I don’t know why the young lady would walk that far when we are here, that’s easy to see, and we have phones so we could have called someone for her,” Milhouse said.
In addition, she said, the road near the landing is a busy one. “It’s not a quiet country road,” she said. “There’s a lot of people driving up and down, all parts of the day and night.”
She said she did not see the car go into the water, but heard sirens as authorities responded.
“When I heard what happened, I just couldn’t go to sleep at all, thinking about those two little boys,” she said.
It wasn’t immediately known whether Duley had retained an attorney.
The boys’ father, who doesn’t live at the same residence as the children, has been interviewed by investigators, Williams said. The sheriff said he didn’t know the father’s whereabouts at the time of the incident.
Duley has a third child, a 5-year-old daughter, who was at the home of her maternal grandmother, where Duley lived with her children, he said.
The incident has similarities to a 1994 case, also in South Carolina. The bodies of Michael Daniel Smith, 3, and 14-month-old Alexander Tyler Smith were found in their mother’s car, still strapped into their car seats, in John D. Long Lake in Union, South Carolina. Their mother, Susan Smith, was convicted on two counts of murder, but jurors opted to spare her the death penalty and she was sentenced to 30 years to life in prison.
The case inflamed racial tensions in Union, because Susan Smith claimed at first she had been carjacked by an African-American man. She stuck to that story for nine days, issuing tearful pleas for her sons’ return on national media outlets, before confessing to authorities. Prosecutors alleged she killed her children after being rejected by a man she was dating who did not want children.
Copyright 2010 Cable News Network