Alex Murdaugh.Photo: Orange County Department of Corrections
WhenAlex Murdaughentered a courtroom on Sept. 16 showing few signs of being shot in the head 12 days earlier as he’d claimed, questions swirled about whether or not he was telling the truth.
On Friday, his spokesperson released some of Murdaugh’s medical records, saying in an email she was doing so after receiving “numerous requests” for them.
The documents show that he was, in fact, shot in the back of the head — but just peripherally.
A “head-to-toe examination” at Memorial Health in Savannah, Ga., on Sept. 4 at 5:34 p.m., where Murdaugh was admitted to the ICU on the trauma list, “revealed two superficial appearing bullet wounds to the posterior scalp with no active hemorrhage,” the chief resident in the Department of General Surgery wrote in an addendum, the records show.
By the time Murdaugh was airlifted from Hampton, S.C., where the shooting took place, to Savannah, the bleeding from “two wounds to the back of the patient’s head” was “controlled,” the Hampton County EMS wrote in another of the documents.
“A CT scan of the head,” the chief resident goes on to say, “revealed a parietal skull fracture and underlying small subdural and subarachnoid hemorrhage,” or bleeding on his brain.
The chief resident wrote that Murdaugh had “questionable loss of consciousness.”
“Patient reports that he immediately lost his vision, but it has slowly returned over time,” the chief resident wrote. “He was able to call EMS himself.”
Murdaugh arrived in the trauma bay “awake and alert,” he wrote. Murdaugh complained of continued abnormal vision and doctors found no sign of ballistic fragments, he wrote.
In terms of lacerations, he had a “hemostatic GSW (gunshot wound) entry exit to posterior scalp.”
He also tested positive for barbiturates and opiates in his blood, the documents show. One of his attorneys had said he suffered from an opioid addiction for 20 years.
On June 7, Murdaugh, a longtime attorney and fixture in the South Carolina legal world, had come home to find his wife, Maggie Murdaugh, 52, and their son, Paul Murdaugh, 22 gunned down on the grounds of their Islandton hunting lodge.
Maggie, Paul and Alex Murdaugh.
He has been considered a person of interest in the killings “from the get-go,” his attorney, Jim Griffin, recently revealed in an interview withFOX Carolina News.
The report was shocking to many.
But police quickly found out that Murdaugh had allegedly asked the man, Curtis Smith, a former client, to shoot and kill him so his surviving son could reap the benefits of a $10 million life insurance payout.
The Murdaugh Family.
A Once-Prominent Lawyer Under Fire
The day before Murdaugh’s medical records were released, Smith went onTodayto reiterate that he did not pull the trigger on Sept. 4.
“I didn’t shoot him,” Smith said onToday. “I’m innocent. If I’d have shot him, he’d be dead. He’s alive.”
Smith said that on Sept. 4, Murdaugh had asked him to meet him on a rural road in Hampton.
When he got there, he said Murdaugh was holding a gun. “And he’s standing like this. He said, ‘You gonna shoot me?’ I said, ‘No,'” Smith said. “He said, ‘Well, you’ve got to do it.’ And he made this move like this, and I just grabbed his arm.
“I shoved [the gun] up behind him, between me and him. And it went off.”
Smith says he is “1,000%” sure that Murdaugh dodged the bullet.
On Sept. 16, agents of the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division (SLED) arrested Murdaugh, alleging that he had “conspired with Curtis Edward Smith to assist him in committing suicide for the explicit purpose of allowing a beneficiary to collect life insurance.”
Murdaugh is charged with insurance fraud, conspiracy to commit insurance fraud, and filing a false police report in connection with the Sept. 4 incident. He has not yet entered a plea.
Smith was arrested on September 14 and charged with assisted suicide, aggravated assault and battery and insurance fraud in connection with the shooting. He has not yet entered a plea.
In a text message to PEOPLE, Smith’s attorney, Jonny McCoy, said Murdaugh was lying about the shooting.
“None of these lies make any difference,” McCoy wrote. “It’s an unprosecutable case against Eddie. Good thing too Bc he’s innocent. They called it gunshot wound based on alex’s words. If he would’ve said ‘hey doc, I tripped and fell on something sharp’ with the same wounds, the doctor would say ‘appears to be a sharp object from a trip and fall.'”
On Friday, one of Murdaugh’s attorneys, Dick Harpootlian, appeared onGood Morning America, saying he wanted to “set the record straight” on a number of “hysterical theories,” including Smith’s assertion that he never shot Murdaugh.
“We furnished to you medical hospitals from the record which indicate he had two bullet wounds in the head, his skull was fractured,” Harpootlian said onGMA. “He had a brain bleed and he was put in ICU because his life was in danger as a result of being shot in the head.”
He also addressed Murdaugh’s arrest Thursday on accusations he misappropriated insurance settlement funds in the wrongful death suit that followed the mysterious trip and fall death of his longtime housekeeper, Gloria Satterfield.
Murdaugh is going “to right every wrong, financial wrong and others that he may have committed,” Harpootlian said.
He also acknowledged that Murdaugh knows he’ll go to prison for this. “He understands that,” Harpootlian said. “He’s a lawyer.”
On Thursday, agents with SLED and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement took the longtime attorney into custody as he left a drug rehabilitation facility in Orlando, Fla., SLED wrote in a release.
“These charges stem from a SLED investigation into misappropriated settlement funds in the death of Gloria Satterfield,” the release says.
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Satterfield worked as the housekeeper for the Murdaugh family for years. She purportedly died after an accident in their home in 2018. Her sons filed a wrongful death lawsuit — allegedly at Murdaugh’s suggestion, the sons’ attorney, Eric Bland said.
“But they “never saw a dime of it,” Bland said.
Murdaugh was taken to Orange County Corrections.
On Friday, he waived his extradition hearing in Orange County and is expected to be brought back to South Carolina “as soon as possible” where he will receive a bond hearing,WCBD reports.
source: people.com
