The body of a teenager was exhumed after his death received renewed interest, and a homicide investigation was reopened, following the trial of convicted killer Alex Murdaugh.
Stephen Smith, 19, was found in 2015 on a rural road about 15 miles from the Murdaugh property known as Moselle and his death was initially ruled to be the result of a hit-and-run, according to South Carolina investigators.
Eric Bland, an attorney for Smith’s mother, Sandy Smith, confirmed that — with the assistance of of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, or SLED — the teenager’s body was exhumed, re-examined and put “to his final resting place this past weekend.”
“I now believe that Stephen can really rest at ease because SLED and our team are going to do everything possible to find out just how he died,” Bland said in a tweet on Sunday.
A homicide investigation reopened six years later
The Smith family’s search for answers was energized in June 2021 in the weeks after the murders of Margaret Murdaugh, 52, and her son, Paul, 22, at their estate in Colleton County.
Agents with the SLED announced that their investigation into the slayings, which were unsolved at the time, had prompted reviews into other deaths in the area and that had some connection with the Murdaughs, a powerful family in the coastal area of South Carolina known as Lowcountry.
SLED said it was opening an inquiry into Smith’s death in 2021 “based upon information gathered during the course of the double murder investigation.”
Sandy Smith said last month that she planned to have her son’s body exhumed for an independent autopsy using money from a GoFundMe account started to financially support the cause.
“We need a new, unbiased look at his body and an accurate determination of his cause of death based on facts,” she wrote on her GoFundMe page.
Investigators said in 2015 that it appeared Smith was hit by a vehicle while standing outside of his car after it had run out of gas, reported NBC affiliate…
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