CAMDEN, S.C. (AP) - The mother of a Kershaw County man accused of abducting and assaulting a 14-year-old girl was charged Tuesday with helping her son elude authorities and survive in underground bunkers, Sheriff Steve McCaskill said.
Vinson Filyaw, 36, was charged this past weekend with kidnapping and raping a 14-year-old girl who sent her mother a cell phone text message from a bunker that led to the teen's rescue Saturday.
On Tuesday, the sheriff said Filyaw's mother, 55-year-old Ginger Nell Cobb, was arrested after police learned she was working with Filyaw's common-law wife to provide him food, water and other supplies.
Filyaw's common-law wife, Cynthia Hall, was arrested last week as the search for Filyaw narrowed.
Police had been looking for Filyaw since November, when an arrest warrant was issued in the rape of a 12-year-old girl. But he used an elaborate system of bunkers in the woods near his home to elude authorities and survived on supplies he received from the two women, the sheriff said.
Cobb would bring the items to Hall, who would them for Filyaw to retrieve from an abandoned vehicle near his bunkers, McCaskill said.
"He would come out of the woods and get it ... at night or whenever," the sheriff said.
Filyaw was captured early Sunday and was being held at the county jail without bond. He also faces charges of possession of an incendiary device and impersonating an officer.
Police say Filyaw, wearing a shirt with the image of a sheriff's badge on it, abducted the girl as she walked home from a school bus stop Sept. 6.
The teen was found 10 days later in a booby-trapped, roughly 8-foot-deep hole carved out of the side of a hill.
McCaskill said Tuesday he didn't think Filyaw specifically targeted the 14-year-old.
She "was probably somebody that was in the area and handy," he said. "There's a lot of kids who get off at this bus stop."
Filyaw surrendered Sunday to police as he walked along Interstate 20 near Columbia, about five miles from where investigators found the teenager a day earlier.
Police said he had been hiding since he was charged in the November rape of a 12-year-old girl.
According to an incident report, Filyaw woke the girl who was sleeping in the same bed as her mother and threatened the mother if she said anything. He then took the girl to another room and sexually assaulted her.
The girl said she told her mother about the incidents, but nothing happened, according to the report. Authorities were alerted when the girl told a school guidance counselor, according to the report.
According to State Law Enforcement Division records, Filyaw's arrest record in the state dates back to a shoplifting arrest in 1987. Since then, he has been arrested a number of times, for offenses ranging from public drunkenness to first-degree burglary.
