Samantha Josephson was out having fun with friends just months after graduating from college, but got into the wrong car believing it was her Uber and suffered “heinous, cruel and malicious acts,” a state prosecutor told the jury trying her alleged killer Tuesday.
He got into the wrong car believing it was his Uber and suffered “cruel acts” until he died
Josephson, 21, of Robbinsville, N.J., was in the Five Points neighborhood of Columbia when he got into Nathaniel Rowland’s black Chevrolet Impala, trusting it was the vehicle he had ordered through his mobile app.
“It is these intentional, deliberate, heinous, cruel and malicious acts for which Nathaniel David Rowland has been charged with kidnapping Samantha Josephson and murdering her,” reiterated Gipso, the U.S. Attorney for the Fifth Circuit in South Carolina.
The prosecutor ominously reconstructed the facts: Josephson was celebrating the end of college and her killer was lying in wait.
Gipson said of the victim and her friends that “they had their eyes firmly set on their future and their eyes firmly set on their love for each other.
” But what they didn’t realize, what they could never realize, is that the defendant, Nathaniel David Rowland, had his eyes firmly fixed on Samantha Josephson.”
“He had his eyes on her as she walked alone through the Bird Dog Lounge in Five Points, as she had ordered an Uber ride, alone,” she recounted.
When the young woman got into the car, she had no way to get out because the child locks were engaged and the doors could only be opened from the outside, Gipson said.
Josephson’s blood and cell phone were found in Rowland’s vehicle after her body was discovered in the woods on a dirt road.
He had wounds to his head, neck, face, upper body, one leg and one foo
