LEARNING FROM A TRAGIC MISTAKE
Samantha Josephson’s fake ride-share murder
Just weeks shy of her graduation from the University of South Carolina, 21-year-old Samantha Josephson was ready for a night out. Sami, as those closest to the “fun-loving, generous” senior called her, rounded up a few friends and headed to the Bird Dog, a favourite hangout. Around 1.30am on Friday, March 29, Samantha got separated from her pals and decided to order an Uber home. Along with other details about the car and driver, the app told her the arriving vehicle would be black. So when a black Chevrolet Impala pulled up, Sami, who surveillance video showed was distracted on her phone, slid into the backseat. It would be a fatal mistake. Hunters found her body the next day, stabbed and discarded off a dirt road 100km away. “Samantha was a trusting kid,” says her father, Seymour. “A black car pulled up, and she got into it. This is every parent’s worst nightmare.”
After the arrest of a suspect, Nathaniel Rowland, 25 – who is charged with kidnapping and murder – Sami’s parents, Seymour, 53, and Marci, 54, from New Jersey, were moved by their heartbreaking loss to launch a campaign for ride-share safety. Among other efforts, they propose vehicles operated by ride-share services be affixed with a printed barcode, so passengers can confirm
their vehicles by matching the code to one sent to their phones. (South Carolina lawmakers have also proposed ride-share vehicles display lighted signs.)
Most simply and significantly, the Josephsons’ initiative (whatsmyname.org) urges riders to stay outside a vehicle until the driver confirms the name of the person who booked the trip. “If Samantha had asked him what her name was, he would have had no idea, and she wouldn’t have gotten in,” says Marci. “If you have a stranger that’s going to try to scoop up someone, they’re not going to be able to.”
Police who arrested the suspect said he fled from his black Impala on foot after a traffic stop. Inside the car they found Samantha’s phone and what they determined to be her blood in the boot and passenger compartment; they also noted the childsafety locks were activated, which would have prevented escape from the backseat.
“We believe she simply mistakenly got into this particular car thinking it was an Uber ride,” said Columbia police chief William Holbrook.
However, Rowland’s family believes the police have the wrong man, claiming someone else had taken his car while he was “passed out” at a party. “I don’t believe it was him in the car,” his cousin Trey Elmore told The State.
Samantha was “awesome … fun, silly, kind,” a politicalscience major who was debating which law school to attend, says Seymour. Adds Marci: “Her dream was to go to law school, work, marry and then become a mom and live at the beach.”
Now, the Josephsons are determined to do everything they can in their daughter’s honour to help others. Says Seymour: “We don’t want this to happen to somebody else.”