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  • Son Charged in Blair Double Murder

    Matthew Richard Mahorsky

    BLAIR – The Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office officially charged Matthew Richard Mahorsky, 40, with two counts of murder Tuesday morning after the bodies of his parents, Ruth Marion Mahorsky, 70, and Richard F. Mahorsky, 71, were found shot to death Monday outside their home at 80 Highway 215 S. in Blair, near the intersection of Highway 34. Matthew Mahorsky is also charged with possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime.

    The Sheriff’s Office said a security check of the property was conducted Monday morning after Marion Mahorsky failed to show up at work at Provident Bank in Winnsboro and co-workers were unable to reach anyone at the home by phone. At 9:15 a.m. Monday, a deputy arrived at the home and immediately spotted a body, with obvious signs of massive trauma, lying in the driveway. The deputy backed out of the drive, secured the area and called for backup. When the Special Response Team arrived moments later, a second body was discovered nearby, between the first body and the house. Both had been dead for some time, the Sheriff’s Office said, and it was later determined that both had been shot some time late Sunday afternoon.

    The first victim was later identified as Marion Mahorsky, while the body located closer to the house was identified as that of her husband, Richard F. Mahorsky. Both victims had been shot through the head with a high-powered rifle, the Sheriff’s Office said. Several weapons, including a high-powered rifle, were recovered from the home. An autopsy was being conducted at press time to determine the number of times the victims were shot, while the State Law Enforcement Division (SLED) is analyzing the weapons seized from the home. Keith Lewis, Chief Deputy of the Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office, said witnesses in the neighborhood reported hearing three shots fired late Sunday afternoon and several shell casings were recovered from the scene.

    Approximately 10 minutes after the Sheriff’s Office secured the perimeter, Matthew Mahorsky emerged from the home through the garage, unarmed, and surrendered to deputies without incident. He was held for questioning as a person of interest for approximately 24 hours before being charged. Lewis said Matthew Mahorsky made several comments during questioning that led to the charges, including telling investigators where they could find the suspected murder weapon, a Remington model 700 .308, which was being tested by SLED at press time.

    Matthew Mahorsky was previously arrested on a pointing and presenting a firearm charge following an altercation with his father in 2004. During that incident, Lewis said, Mahorsky pointed a handgun at his father’s head and threatened to kill him before his mother managed to calm him down. When deputies responded to that incident, Lewis said, they were told then that Matthew had a history of mental illness. He received a one-year suspended sentence with three years’ probation in the 2004 incident.

    Lewis said there was no evidence that Matthew Mahorsky was using alcohol at the time of the shooting, but a bottle of prescription medication, used to treat schizophrenia and bearing Matthew Mahorsky’s name, was recovered from the home.

    “This is a terrible and senseless tragedy,” Fairfield County Sheriff Herman Young said. “Our thoughts and prayers are with the Mahorsky family and friends.”

  • Man in Custody After Parents Found Dead in Blair Home

    BLAIR – The Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office has a man in custody after two people were found shot to death in their home in Blair Monday morning.

    Matthew Richard Mahorsky, 40, is being held as a person of interest, the Sheriff’s Office said Monday afternoon, after the bodies of his parents, Ruth Marion Mahorsky, 70, and Richard F. Mahorsky, 71, were found at their home at 80 Highway 215 S. in Blair.

    The Sheriff’s Office said a security check of the property was conducted Monday after Marion Mahorsky failed to show up at work at Provident Bank in Winnsboro and co-workers were unable to reach anyone at the home by phone. The Sheriff’s Office said they believe the shooting took place some time between Sunday afternoon and Monday morning. The incident remains under investigation and no charges have yet been filed.

  • Preparing for Disaster — Local Company Has Your Backup Plan

    Rick Fosnacht (left) and Tim Lord, owners of Contingency Planning and Outsourcing, Inc., lead the way in disaster preparedness, for businesses and for schools.

    Business models are set up to plan for success, but what about disaster? In the 21st century workplace, where companies store more data out in the ether than they do in filing cabinets, planning for disaster is the business model for one local company, Contingency Planning and Outsourcing, Inc. (CPO).

    Tim Lord, of Winnsboro, founded the company back in 2000. With 31 years in the business, Lord knew he had the makings of a software system that could help companies recover data and, more importantly, stay in contact with customers and investors in the event of a disaster. Lord quickly brought in Rick Fosnacht, of Blythewood, a computer system designer and developer, to help him flesh out the CPO system. A year later, they hit the market, and soon they had converted to their system one of the biggest names in the technology field: Lockheed Martin.

    That’s right: the people who build spaceships.

    “Our software tool assists companies, schools and universities to be prepared for any type of emergency,” Lord said. “It’s not just the data, but the business. In the event of an emergency, how are they going to communicate with employees? How are they going to connect with their investors, their customers?”

    For example, Lord said, suppose your local doctor’s office burned to the ground overnight.

    “How is the doctor going to communicate with his patients?” Lord said. “How is he going to bill those patients? How is he going to know who to bill?”

    And that is where CPO comes in, not just with a data recovery plan, but a contingency plan for the business itself.

    “You have got to be ready,” Lord said. “Know what you’re going to do and know whose going to do what.”

    It is a system CPO is currently marketing to schools, particularly in the wake of last December’s school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

    “In (Newtown), one of the classroom doors would not lock, and the intruder was able to come into that room,” Lord said. “Our system can set up a task – ‘check door locks every two weeks.’ The system will automatically send a reminder to the person responsible for making that check and also send a notification to the school principal if it hasn’t been done.”

    Schools are required to have a ‘safe schools’ plan, Lord said, but typically that information is housed at individual schools, is rarely practiced or rehearsed, and the information (emergency contact numbers, etc.) contained therein rapidly becomes obsolete. And, Lord said, most of what is in those plans should be maintained and managed at the district level, not at the individual schools.

    That was precisely the scenario CPO found in the Greenville County School District six years ago when they installed their system there.

    “The best plan they had was two years old,” Lord said, “and 85 percent of it belonged at the district level. We moved it there (to the District Office) and now one person sits at a desk and monitors 100 schools. The system tells them if they are ready for an emergency or not.”

    Lord and Fosnacht are so passionate about schools adopting their system they are offering it for a cut-rate price. Still, Greenville County is the only K-12 public school system in the state to adopt their software. The state of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, is currently considering CPO for all of their school districts. Other CPO clients include the U.S. Navy, DHL, the University of California at Los Angeles and Fordham University.

    “There is a need out there,” Lord said, “and we are almost giving this away to schools.”

    After all, the worst time to discover you need a disaster plan is during a disaster.

  • Judge Tosses Defamation, Conspiracy Suit

    FAIRFIELD – A civil lawsuit, filed last year against the County by David Michael Hollis, former head of Animal Control, was dismissed last month by a Sixth Judicial Circuit Court judge. The judge in the case, Brooks P. Goldsmith, tossed the suit after agreeing with the County that Hollis was barred from his defamation claim under the S.C. Tort Claims Act, and that his status as a public official and an at-will employee barred him from making a claim of civil conspiracy.

    Hollis filed the action March 1, 2012 against the County, as well as County Administrator Phil Hinely and Deputy Administrator Davis Anderson, after being terminated from his position in January of 2012. David Brown, who was then an Animal Control officer and is now the head of Animal Control, was also named as a defendant in the suit. The termination came on the heels of questions about how Hollis handled a January 2012 incident in which one dog attacked another in Fairfield County. The victim in the attack eventually had one hind leg amputated by a Fairfield County veterinarian, while the attacking dog was later euthanized. Hollis’s suit alleged defamation and civil conspiracy and sought $2 million in damages.

    In his analysis of the defamation claim, Goldsmith wrote that, under S.C. law, a plaintiff must show that “a false and defamatory statement was made; the unprivileged publication was made to a third party; the publisher was at fault;” and that the statement caused “special harm.” As a public official, Hollis also had the “constitutional burden” of proving the statements were made with “actual malice,” Goldsmith noted.

    In his analysis of the civil conspiracy claim, Goldsmith wrote that Hollis, as a public official and an at-will employee, “cannot maintain a civil conspiracy claim against a private party.”

    In his original lawsuit, Hollis claimed that he was fired by Anderson on Jan. 20, 2012 for alleged incompetence in the handling of the dog attack case. The suit also alleged that, at the behest of the defendants, an e-mail message was circulated by a third party requesting “honest people” to attend a meeting to speak out about Hollis’s “abuse of his job.” The suit also alleged that Hollis was approached by Brown at a Feb. 9, 2012 County Council meeting and publicly accused of incompetence in the dog attack case.

    Hollis’s suit also claimed that Brown was brought in as his replacement because of Brown’s relationship to the Clerk to County Council – Brown’s wife, Shryll Brown. Hollis claimed that Anderson and Brown together conspired to replace him, meeting in secret over a span of several months in order to hatch their scheme.

    Goldsmith dismissed the case on March 18.

  • Two Charged in Church Burglary

    Morgan Dean Murphy

    RIDGEWAY – Two Ridgeway men were arrested last week and charged with a March 24 break-in of Sawney’s Creek Baptist Church at 14605 Highway 34 E. in Ridgeway.

    According to the Fairfield County Sheriff’s Office, 17-year-old Morgan Dean Murphy, of 289 Murphy Trail in Ridgeway, and 19-year-old Cameron James Wells, of 1150 Centerville Road in Ridgeway, were charged with second-degree burglary. Murphy was arrested March 26 and Wells on March 27.

    On March 24, Sheriff’s deputies responded to Sawney’s Creek Baptist at 9 p.m. after a church trustee discovered a 32-inch RCA flat-screen television worth $287 and a set of speakers worth $50 missing from the church’s children’s room. The next day, deputies received information leading investigators to question Wells about the break-in. According to the incident report, Wells told investigators that Murphy had “made (Wells) walk with him” to the church. While Wells waited in the parking lot, Murphy reportedly climbed through an unlocked window. Murphy then exited the church with a flat-screen television through a door. Wells told investigators that Murphy made him carry the television back to Murphy’s house. Wells also said Murphy had another television at his house that Murphy had stolen from the same church in February.

    When officers arrived at Murphy’s home to execute a search warrant just before 5 p.m. on March 26, they spotted Murphy coming toward the home out of the nearby woods and placed him under arrest. Officers located the stolen speakers inside Murphy’s home and the RCA flat-screen television in the woods behind the home. According to the incident report, officers also learned that the Sylvania flat-screen television stolen in February had been sold at a pawn shop in Lugoff. Wells turned himself in to deputies the following morning.

    “My office treats all crimes as serious, but crimes against churches are particularly senseless,” Fairfield County Sheriff Herman Young said. “I’m glad we were able to make two arrests and recover the stolen items for the church.”

  • Local Schools Win Palmetto Gold, Silver

    The S.C. Department of Education recognized 622 schools last week as recipients of the 2012-2013 Palmetto Gold and Silver Awards, including seven area Richland 2 schools and two Fairfield County schools. The schools received honors for either General Performance or Closing the Achievement Gap, or both.

    In Richland 2, Bethel-Hanberry Elementary, Blythewood Middle School and Lake Carolina Elementary earned gold in both categories. Blythewood High School, Bookman Road Elementary and Round Top Elementary earned gold and Langford Elementary earned silver in General Performance.

    In the Fairfield County School District, Fairfield Central High School earned silver and the Fairfield Magnet School for Math and Science earned gold in General Performance. This is the second straight year that these two schools have received either a Palmetto Gold or Silver award, the School District said.

  • FCHS Names New Principal

    FAIRFIELD – At a special called meeting at the District Office March 28, the Fairfield County School Board voted 6-0 to hire Tracie Swilley as the new principal at Fairfield Central High School. Swilley, who received her Bachelor of Science degree from Columbia College and her Master of Education degree from the University of South Carolina, is currently the Assistant Principal for Curriculum and Instruction at Lower Richland High School. She officially comes on board July 1.

    Swilley replaces David Corley, who will move to the District Office as the District’s Disciplinary Hearing and Safety Officer. Swilley will earn $83,741 as head of Fairfield Central.

    Shamieka B. Johnson Simms contributed to this story.

  • Voice Publisher Named to SCPA Executive Committee

    Barbara Ball

    GREENVILLE, S.C. – Barbara Ball, publisher of The Independent Voice of Blythewood and Fairfield County, was elected to the Executive Committee of the S.C. Press Association at the organization’s annual meeting at the Poinsett Hotel in Greenville March 23.

    “Barbara has been an active member of the Press Association for many years and we think she will be a strong representative of smaller community papers on our board,” said Bill Rogers, SCPA Executive Director.

    Ball founded The Country Chronicle in November 1998, selling the publication in June of 2005. Ball then founded The Voice in June of 2010, expanding that publication to include Fairfield County in June 2012.

    Ball joins Dan Cook, editor of the Free Times in Columbia, Jane Pigg of Cheraw, publisher of The Link, and Gayle Smith, vice president of advertising for The Post and Courier in Charleston on two-year terms on the Committee.
    Debbie Abels, publisher of The Herald in Rock Hill, and Mike Smith, executive editor of the Herald-Journal in Spartanburg, were re-elected to continuing terms on the Committee.

    Jack Osteen, publisher of The Item in Sumter, was elected president of the SCPA. Morrey Thomas, publisher of the News and Press in Darlington, was elected weekly vice president; Judi Mundy Burns, publisher of the Index-Journal in Greenwood, daily vice president; and Ellen Priest, president and publisher of The Summerville Journal Scene, The (Goose Creek) Gazette and The Berkeley Independent in Moncks Corner, treasurer.
    The SCPA Executive Committee is the governing body of the association, which represents every daily newspaper in the state and more than 90 weekly newspapers.

  • Blythewood Man Killed in Car Fire

    RICHLAND – A Blythewood man was killed last week in a single-vehicle crash in Northeast Richland County.

    Richland County Coroner Gary Watts said Samuel L. Burgess Jr., 38, of 205 LongCreek Plantation Drive, was traveling on the 300 block of Rice Meadow Way when his car ran off the side of the road some time between 12:30 and 3 a.m. March 27 and struck a small tree. Watts said the damage to the car was minor and that the car may have gotten stuck in the sandy ground.

    Watts said it was unclear if Burgess fell asleep in the crashed car with the engine still running or if Burgess had some other issue that prevented him from exiting the car; however, the car caught fire after the crash and was totally engulfed in flames by the time the fire department arrived on the scene. An autopsy conducted later that day indicated that Burgess died from smoke inhalation and thermal injuries as a result of the fire.

    Burgess was the only occupant of the vehicle, Watts said.

    The incident remains under investigation by the Richland County Coroner’s Office and Richland County Sheriff’s Department.

  • Local Farms Open for Tour

    Selwin and Edwina Harrell, owners of Crooked Cedar Farm on Lawhorn Road.

    Two Blythewood farms and nine others in Richland, Kershaw and Lexington counties will open their barn doors and farm gates for the inaugural Midlands Tour of Sustainable Family Farms, Saturday and Sunday, April 6-7, from 1 – 5 p.m. on both days.

    Crooked Cedar Farm on Lawhorn Road, owned by Selwin and Edwina Harrell, and Doko Farm in Cedar Creek, owned Joe and Amanda Jones, will invite the public to take self-guided tours of their working farms and gardens.

    In addition to gardens and crops, a variety of farm animals including chickens, pigs and goats, will be on hand to welcome the tour guests. The farmers will also be teaching gardening and growing techniques such as square foot gardening, permaculture, hydroponics and raised vegetable beds. All of the vegetables, fruits, flowers, mushrooms and more are grown without harmful pesticides.

    Tour visitors are encouraged to enjoy a farm-fresh picnic or snack with food and treats purchased at the farms. Children will learn where their food comes from, play fun farm games and more.

    Blythewood’s Crooked Cedar Farm produces for sale an endless array of seasonal tasty, colorful organic vegetables, herbs, fruits, strawberries and blueberries. The Harrells also grow and sell perennial plants and flowers.

    The Harrells have lived on and worked the 11-acre farm for almost 35 years — since they were newlyweds. The garden started as a 50 x 100-foot plot when the Harrells’ boys were small. Today, the ever-expanding operation is a commercial endeavor that covers more than three acres. Besides garden produce, the Harrells raise chickens and sell eggs. Edwina cans or dries much of their garden’s produce for sale at the All-Local Market on Whaley Street in Columbia on Saturday mornings year round. Orders can also be placed for produce, eggs and canned/dried products by calling 786-4841 or emailing crookedcedarfarmsc@gmail.com and picked up at the farm.

    Doko Farm, like the other farms, is always a work in progress and currently sells organic eggs, pork, lamb and ducks. It is located at 2102 Cedar Creek Road in Blythewood. The farm has been in Joe’s family for several generations. Today he and his wife take pride in turning acreage into a sustainable family farm. Orders for the Jones’ farm products can be placed by calling 803-873-7739 or emailing dokofarm@gmail.com or go to www.dokofarm.org.

    Tour tickets, good for both days, are $25 per vehicle in advance. Tickets are available for purchase during the tour for $30 or you can also choose to pay $10 per farm (available for purchase at all the farms during the tour.) Groups of cycles count as one vehicle. Complete information about the tour and the farms, with interactive maps and driving directions to each farm, plus tour tickets are available at www.carolinafarmstewards.org. You can also pick up a printed brochure and buy tickets at Whole Foods Market in Columbia closer to the event date.

    Visit any farm in any order and bring a cooler so you can bring home some of the farm fresh products that will be on sale at many of the farms. No pets allowed. The tour is rain or shine. Proceeds from the tour support the work of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association.