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Newly released video shows South Carolina investigators questioning a survivor of the deadly 2019 boat crash involving a suspect who was gunned down alongside his mother in June.
Officers with the state’s Department of Natural Resources were interviewing Miley Altman, a then-20-year-old passenger who was on her way home from a party with friends when their boat slammed into a pylon and killed another passenger, 19-year-old Mallory Beach.
She tells them she believes Paul Murdaugh was driving the boat right before the crash but couldn’t be certain because she wasn’t looking back at the console, according to the video, which was obtained by the Blufton-based Island Packet newspaper.
Paul Murdaugh
(South Carolina Attorney General’s Office/WTAT-TV/DT)
“I’m pretty sure it was Paul,” she tells investigators, who at the time were eyeing both Murdaugh and Connor Cook as potential drivers in the crash.
She also says that Murdaugh asked to borrow her phone after the crash to call his grandfather, the area’s former top prosecutor.
“I think at that point, he wanted to call his dad, but he called his granddad first,” she said. “That’s the first thing he did.”
Murdaugh was charged with three felonies in connection with the crash – but not until a few weeks later.
Last week, as part of court proceedings brought by fellow crash survivor Cook, the state released his deposition recorded in connection with a wrongful death lawsuit that stemmed from the crash.
Cook alleged that Murdaugh’s father, Alex Murdaugh, had pressured him not to tell investigators who was driving the boat at the time of the crash. The elder Murdaugh has not responded to Fox News requests for comment.
The six young people were all underage at the time. They’d spent the afternoon and evening drinking, and shortly before the crash, Cook and Murdaugh went into a bar, where they each bought a round of drinks before getting back on the 17-foot center console boat with the others.
Surveillance video from 2019 shows Paul Murdaugh (right) walking to his father’s boat in downtown Beaufort shortly before he allegedly crashed a boat near Parris Island.
(Department of Natural Resources/Provided)
Cook filed a petition in a South Carolina court last month alleging that state and county investigators may have conspired with “unknown” accomplices to try and frame him for the crash, although only Murdaugh was charged. One of the officers involved in the Altman interview, Austin Pritcher, is named in the petition.
Both the DNR and the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office have declined to comment on the ongoing civil litigation.
After giving her statement in the video, Pritcher asks her to write it down.
The younger Murdaugh was awaiting trial on three felony boating while intoxicated charges in connection with the incident when he was murdered alongside his mother.
Further complicating the mystery – state investigators announced that they had uncovered information while looking into the slayings that led them to reopen in the probe into the 2015 death of Stephen Smith, 19.
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