As investigators told it, Tim and Angie Phillips of Buffalo, S.C., were entertaining their friends Carl Sydney White and Sonja Phillips at a family cookout last week when the subject of Susan Smith came up. White, 29, and Tim Phillips, 26, were lifelong buddies; Sonja Phillips, who was not related to Tim, was White’s girlfriend. The Phillipses’ three young daughters were there, along with Sonja Phillips’s two girls and a 3-year-old boy for whom Sonja often baby-sat. The adults decided to drive to Long Lake, about 10 miles away, and piled all six children into the Phillipses’ ‘87 GMC Sierra for the trip.
They got to the lake a little before 9 p.m. Tim Phillips, in the driver’s seat, parked the blue Sierra and shined its headlights on a monument to Michael and Alex. White, Angie Phillips and Sonja Phillips and her two daughters got out. Suddenly the van lurched forward and rolled down a steep, grassy slope toward the lake. Someone outside the car cried “Oh, no!” as it plowed toward the water. White and Angie Phillips made a heroic effort to save Tim and the kids. Both died trying–though police said Angie, whose body was found inside the car, managed to free her dying children from their seat belts. Sonja Phillips got a motorist to call the police, but it was too late. The seven bodies were recovered by the same divers who found the Smith children in 1994.
Despite the parallels to the murder case that put Union County on the map, investigators say there is no evidence this was a copycat crime. By all accounts the Phillipses were a close-knit, loving family. Could it have been a grim prank gone wrong? An autopsy showed a trace of alcohol in Tim Phillips’s blood–but only enough, according to Sheriff Howard Wells, to suggest that he had consumed about half a beer. Wells speculated about a mechanical problem with the vehicle, which had a history of transmission troubles and was in “park” when it was towed from the lake. (Federal officials said there were no reports of transmission problems on comparable GMC Suburbans.) But the sheriff also said there was no sign Phillips tried to stop the van as it pitched down the incline–which meant that Long Lake, already notorious for a crime beyond comprehension, is now the scene of a baffling mystery as well.
