text messaging & the hubby
Sep. 18th, 2006 08:08 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wowieVinson Filyaw, 37, had eluded police with an elaborate system of hideouts and bunkers since November 2005 when he was charged with criminal sexual conduct on a 12-year-old girl, McCaskill said.
Investigators arrested Filyaw in neighboring Richland County about 24 hours after rescuing the girl, who sent a text message to her mother on Filyaw's phone while he was asleep Wednesday, McCaskill said. The sheriff said Filyaw woke up and the girl still had the phone, but she told him she was simply playing with the phone.
"This little lady getting that message out was really the break in the case," the sheriff said. "She helped herself as much as we helped her."
Investigators used cell towers to triangulate the general location of the phone.
Police say they still have not interviewed the girl, whose name was previously released when she was a missing person. USA TODAY is not using her name because police have identified her as a victim of sexual assault.
Police found the girl Saturday about a mile from her home, hidden in a booby-trapped, 15-foot-deep hole carved out of the side of a hill and covered with plywood. The bunker had a hand-dug privy with toilet paper, a camp stove and shelves made with cut branches and canvas.
McCaskill said the girl cried out as searchers approached the bunker.
"She was standing at the mouth of the bunker with the door open," sheriff's Capt. David Thomley told WLTX-TV in Columbia.
Investigators said Filyaw posed as a police officer when he met the girl. He walked her around the woods until she became disoriented and used handmade grenades and a flare gun to threaten her, McCaskill said.
The girl's family reported her missing on Sept. 6. Classmates said she had gotten off the school bus and was last seen walking the quarter mile toward her home in a rural area 10 miles outside of the South Carolina capital, Columbia.
The South Carolina Law Enforcement Division never issued an Amber Alert, a public all-points bulletin that triggers broadcast and traffic messages about a missing child.
According to the South Carolina Amber Alert program manual, such an alert is issued when a law enforcement agency believes a child has been abducted, is in immediate danger, other possibilities for the victim's disappearance have been reasonably excluded, and there is sufficient information available that could help find the victim, suspect or vehicle used in the suspected abduction.
Police were tipped to Filyaw's location Sunday after getting a call from a teen who described a man who she said tried to carjack her and her mother about 2 a.m. outside a pizza restaurant, police said.
Briar Rose Lin, 17, and her mother, Jennifer, had locked up their pizza restaurant in Elgin, S.C., between 2 a.m. and 3 a.m. Sunday and were about to get into their car when a man approached them.
Briar Rose, a high school junior, described him as about 6 feet tall, skinny and wearing camouflage clothing. He had what looked like a paint-covered fake gun, she said.
"He said, 'I need your keys. I need to get out of here. I'm wanted,' " Briar Rose said.
Her mother began arguing with him, giving Briar Rose time to get away and call the police. Police caught Filyaw about 5 miles from his house. He was on foot and carrying a paint-covered pellet gun, a Taser and a long hunting knife.
His girlfriend, Cynthia Hall, has been charged as an accessory and with neglect in the earlier case, McCaskill said. Investigators say she allowed the earlier assault to take place in her home and gave Filyaw supplies to live in the bunker.
On Sunday, the driveway in front of the 14-year-old's home was decorated with "Welcome Home" balloons.
Contributing: Donna Leinwand in McLean, Va.
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