ORANGEBURG, S.C. (AP) -- Investigators didn't buy it when a woman said her two young sons drowned after her car plunged into a river. She ultimately confessed to killing the toddlers, they say -- not by dumping them in the water but by suffocating them earlier with her own hands.
Broke, jobless and berated by her mother for her failings, Shaquan Duley killed the boys, ages 2 years and 18 months, then strapped their bodies into their car seats before rolling the vehicle into the North Edisto River in a desperate cover-up attempt, authorities said Tuesday.
"She truly felt, 'If I don't have these toddlers, I can be free,'" Orangeburg County Sheriff Larry Williams said at a news conference. "I think she was fed up with her mother telling her she couldn't take care of the children, or she wasn't taking care of the children and just wanted to be free."
Coroner Samuetta Marshall told several media outlets Tuesday the older boy had defensive wounds that suggested he had been in a struggle.
Monday's tragic scene of a car being pulled out of the water with children's bodies inside was eerily reminiscent of the 1994 case of another South Carolina mother, Susan Smith, who is serving life in prison for killing her young sons by rolling her car into a lake in the northwest part of the state.
2 comments:
I remember seeing this story on the news. It is heartbreaking as a mother to hear about this. Parenting is not easy, but there is help if we ask for it! My heart goes out to the children because they were not even given the chance to fight back or better yet make a life for themselves.
I am from Columbia, SC and this story was very close to home. I to feel that this was a heartbreaking thing to happen to this family. The mother of the children must have been in a great deal of pain, pressure or something like that to go to such measures. I also feel that the there was a lack of communication somewhere in this famiy. If only she felt that there was someone that she could talk to those children could be here today
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