As Alex Murdaugh told 911 operators that he had been shot last month, a passerby who also called authorities didn’t seem as convinced with his story, according to the newly released 911 call following Murdaugh’s Labor Day shooting. “There’s a man on the road with blood all over him,”A woman could be heard telling operator. “He looks fine, but it kind of looks like a set-up.”
According to the audio files released by the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, the disgraced former lawyer, however, told the operator he had been randomly shot – a narrative that his own lawyer Dick Harpootlian confirmed shortly later had been a lie.
“I got a flat tire and I stopped and somebody stopped to help me and when I turned my back, they tried to shoot me,”Murdaugh said this to the operator. “It was a white fellow, a fair amount younger than me, really really short hair. Ma’am I need an ambulance.”
The alleged assailant Murdaugh described, 61-year-old Curtis Smith, also later said that he did not shoot Murdaugh that day.
“I didn’t shoot him. If I’d have shot him, he’d be dead. He lied,” Smith told the “Today” show. “He said, ‘You gotta shoot me,’ I said, ‘No.’ He said, ‘You just gotta do it, man.’ He made his move. I grabbed his arm, he put it between his eyes.”
The good Samaritan told 911 that she saw blood on Murdaugh, but Smith said he did not see blood when he was at the scene. “There was no blood on me. There was no blood on him,” he said.
Despite Murdaugh seemingly telling authorities that he did not know the attacker, Harpootlian later said that they were associates, and Murdaugh had told him to meet him on Old Salkehatchie Road that day.
“He arranged to have this guy shoot him,” Harpootlian told the “Today” show about a week-and-a-half later. Harpootlian also later called the September 4 shooting a “fake crime.”
When Murdaugh appeared in court a few weeks later on charges of insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud and filing a false police report, witnesses did not recall seeing him with any head bandages.
Smith, however, was charged with assisted suicide, assault and battery of a high aggravated assault, pointing and presenting a firearm, insurance fraud and attempt to commit insurance fraud following the shooting. He is currently out on bond set for $55,000.
Murdaugh was also out on bond and newly released from a Florida drug rehabilitation facility when he was arrested on charges stemming from the alleged misappropriation of millions of dollars in connection with the wrongful death settlement of the family’s former housekeeper Gloria Satterfield.
Murdaugh was denied bond in his two charges of obtaining property by false pretenses, and is now being held at the Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center in Columbia, according to inmate records.
“Alex will cooperate as fully with this investigation as with the one into the murders of his wife, and son.” Murdaugh’s attorneys Harpootlian and Jim Griffin said in a statement in response to the most recent charges, according to CNN. “He is deeply sorry that his actions have diverted from efforts to solve the murders.
The Murdaughs were once a prominent South Carolina family. They have come under scrutiny ever since Murdaugh’s double homicide of Murdaugh and his wife in June. Jim Griffin, his attorney, said that he was named as a person-of-interest.
Griffin denied Murdaugh’s murder of his son or wife.
