Infamous Crime Site Kills 7 More Four Children Drown When Vehicle Rolls Into Lake During Visit To Memorial For Susan Smith’s Kids

The saddest place in the little mill town of Union has a fresher horror now.

Seven people, including four children, died in John D. Long Lake on Saturday night when they came to see the spot where Susan Smith drowned her two young sons in 1994, a murder that drew worldwide attention to the quiet town and has lured thousands to the lip of the lake.

While Angela Blackwood Phillips, 22, stood on the bluff above the water with friends, the vehicle with her husband and children inside rolled between the memorial markers.

A young tree planted in the Smith boys’ memory did not stop the moving vehicle but toppled under its weight. The Chevrolet Suburban slid down the steep embankment into 20 feet of water.

Unlike Susan Smith, who ran the other way while her children went into the lake, then lied for nine days about them, Angie Phillips went after hers but couldn’t save them.

Her body was found inside the van where she apparently had loosened the seat belts of some of the children but failed to free the others before she drowned.

Her husband, Dennis Timothy Phillips, 26, also died in the water. So did Carl Sidney White, 29, of Campobello, S.C., a friend who dived in after the sinking Suburban.

Divers found the vehicle about 80 feet from shore, upside down with the ignition and lights on and the gearshift in park, Union County Sheriff Howard Wells said. The doors were closed. One window was open. There was no sign that anyone had hit the brakes or tried to steer the vehicle away from the lake.

The dead children were Courtney Beaulana Phillips, 4; Meleana Jade Phillips, 23 months; and Kinsleigh Skylar Phillips, 4 months, all children of Tim and Angie Phillips; and 3-year-old Austin Dakota “Cody” Roodvoets of Inman, S.C., whom White and his girlfriend were babysitting.

There were three survivors. White’s girlfriend, Sonya Phillip, and her children, Ashley and Danielle, 11 and 12, watched it all happen. Phillip ran with one of the girls to the highway, where they flagged down a passing motorist to get help. It was too late.

The tragedy came as a morbid byproduct of the curiosity that has drawn countless visitors to the lake to place flowers, say prayers or pose for pictures.

Phillip told authorities that her group had come to the lake after a barbecue. It was about 9 p.m., and with no moon out, it was pitch black at the unlighted area, as it was the night of Oct. 25, 1994, when the Smith brothers, Michael, 3, and Alex, 1, died. Tim Phillips stayed in the van with the younger children, and while everyone else got out to look at the memorials to Michael and Alex, he trained the lights of the van onto the markers. Suddenly, the lights began to move.

The next few hours were eerily reminiscent of those other drownings that still define Union for people who don’t live there.

The four divers called out to recover the bodies were among those who had searched for Michael and Alex Smith. One of them, Steve Morrow, later testified about finding the sunken car - his first vision was little Alex’s hand against the window.

Wells said it’s not yet clear what happened. There were no skid marks on the grass and no real clues to what had caused the Suburban to roll.

But the sheriff said there also is no evidence of any sinister motives behind the deaths, and all indications point toward a horrible accident.

Wells, who knew Smith’s family and felt the personal weight of those murders, said it felt strange to go back to the same place, knowing that once again, children had died there. But that’s all he would say.

Smith, a mill secretary, misled police and the nation for nine days in October 1994 by tearfully begging a fictional carjacker to bring home her sons.

Prosecutors said she was distraught over a love affair with a man who did not want her, in part because of her children, and that she had killed them to win his favor.

Smith, 25, got two life terms in prison for the slayings. She will be eligible for parole in 2025.

For Union, a small town of 10,000 where news travels quickly, Sunday was somber.

“People here are dumbfounded,” said Ralph Greer, a retired newspaper and radio journalist who covered Union and the surrounding countryside for 35 years. No one can believe, Greer said, that such a terrible thing as the drowning of children has visited this place not once, but twice.

That it came as a result of the curiosity over Susan Smith’s crime, something people here want to forget, is eerie, he said.

“People have been coming ever since it happened,” he said of the site. “People from all over the world. They just want to look.”

Some even are wondering if another monument willl be placed at the lake in honor of the lake’s newest victims.

Wanda Reynolds, assistant manager of a Mini-Mart convenience store, talked to law enforcement officers when they stopped in on their way home from the lake Sunday morning. One had helped recover the infant’s body.

Reynolds said the officer said he believes the lake is “doomed.”

“He said they need to drain that place and fill it up with cement - and that’s exactly how I feel, too,” she said.

Wells, though, said no changes are planned.

Just as before, the public will be allowed into the lake area 24 hours a day to see where the Smith tragedy took place.

And now this second tragedy.