State Constable Missing…
I’m sure many of you have seen the news this morning or heard on the radio, but late last night a SC State Constable was discovered missing. He has completed a traffic stop and CCSO received calls about shots fired in the same area shortly thereafter. Units on scene discovered a constable’s hat, gun, and blood in the area. The marked Lincolnville police cruiser was missing. Later on, Berkeley County received a car fire that ended up being the LPD unit. The vehicle was torched by a large church (Faith Assembly) on Farmington Rd. The vehicle was not totally destroyed, however it appeared to be significantly damaged. There was no body in the vehicle. Suspect vehicles are an older, box-style Chevy Caprice, believed to be late 80s, before the redesign to the more contoured style in 1991. It has large, tacky, ugly chrome rims that I’m sure we’ve all seen on the ghetto cars in the area. A second suspect vehicle is a white Ford Crown Vic with a spotlight on it.
We first heard about this on Berkeley County’s radio as they BOLO’d it out to their units. We immediately started making phone calls, as an officer shooting or kidnapping is high priority (it even overrides barking dog calls…). Once we got the 43 we broadcast it to our units as well. The state, and even the FBI from what we overheard on Berkeley’s channel is assisting in the chase, and there are air units involved as well. There was person of interest named earlier, only to be discovered not to be involved.
This has been a bad year for officers in this area. Within the last three or four months we’ve lost four officers – Cpl Deese with DCSO, Cpl Stiles & PFC Wells from MCPD, and my friend PFC Dawn Tillman from BCSO (though her death was off-duty). I hope they find the constable alive and that the suspects are caught and punished. And then they can be punished under the law too, hehe. Hopes and thoughts are with LPD and the constable’s family.