Detective arrested on peeping Tom charges
CHARLESTON - The head of Charleston County's detectives has been arrested after neighbors told police he was on a roof, staring into the bedroom window of an adjoining home, authorities said.
Sheriff's Capt. Jesse Gene Hammet, 43, is on administrative leave after North Charleston police arrested him on two counts of violating the state's peeping Tom law, sheriff's spokesman Capt. John Clark said.
A neighbor called police and said she saw Capt. Hammet get on the roof of his townhouse, scamper across to an adjoining townhouse and peer inside the bedroom window of a 24-year-old woman for five minutes, according to an arrest warrant.
Funds for new hospital exceed $1.6 million
HAMPTON - Hampton's new hospital has received a $400,000 grant from the Duke Endowment, a private foundation that supports nonprofit health care organizations in South Carolina and North Carolina.
Hugh Gray, the chairman of the fund development campaign, said total pledges and grants now exceed $1.6 million.
Since 2006, donations have been received to sponsor specific areas in the hospital, such as the new Intensive Care Unit and the Emergency Department's Quiet Room.
Construction of the new hospital is scheduled to be complete in February 2008.
Paralegal admits to $700,000 wire fraud
CHARLESTON - A paralegal accused of taking nearly $700,000 from a Mount Pleasant law firm pleaded guilty to wire fraud and faces as much as 20 years in prison.
Amy C. Smith, 33, told U.S. District Judge Patrick Michael Duffy that she had been pulled into a get-rich-quick scheme.
Prosecutors said Ms. Smith wired money from the firm's escrow accounts to an accomplice in Ohio within weeks of her hiring a year ago at the Abel and Reynolds law firm.
Ms. Smith's co-defendant, Michelle Essary Biear, 30, was arrested last month in Florida, authorities said.
Five months before she was hired, Ms. Smith was arrested in Horry County on three counts of breach of trust. She received a 10-year suspended sentence.
Hampton County sets example for recycling
LURAY - John Stanley, Hampton County's solid waste and recycling manager, recently announced that the county ranked among the top 10 percent of all the state's counties in recycling rates per capita in 2006.
Last year, county residents disposed of 17,101 tons of solid waste while recycling 6,657 tons for a recycling rate of 28 percent, which falls just below the state average of 30.4 percent.
"We try to do everything that the Department of Health and Environmental Control recommends," Mr. Stanley said.
- Edited from wire reports
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