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DECEMBER 8–14, 2022 WWW.YOURISLANDNEWS.COM
COVERING BEAUFORT COUNTY
Sheriff’s Office gets break in cold case Forensic science and genealogy help identify 1995 murder victim as a Florida woman From staff reports It took more than 27 years, but the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO) has caught a break in the case of an unidentified female murder victim found May 24, 1995 off Cotton Hall Road in Yemassee. Through advanced DNA technology and genealogy research, the woman has been identified as Maria Telles-Gonzalez of Kissimmee, Fla.
About the case On May 24, 1995, an employee from the South Carolina Highway Department discovered the Maria body of a dead womTellesan in a drainage Gonzalez ditch on Cotton Hall Road in Yemassee. Sheriff’s deputies and investigators
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began investigating the death. According to retired BCSO investigator Maj. Bob Bromage, the woman suffered a violent death by strangulation. The woman was killed elsewhere and the body had been moved. When found, she had been dead for 24-36 hours. An autopsy was performed at the Medical University of South Carolina. Pathologists deemed the wom-
an’s death a homicide. The woman, clothed only in underwear, was not identified at the onset of this investigation, and there were no personal effects at the scene to help identify her. Investigators provided information on her death to local media and employed forensic technologies available at the time to try to identify her. Efforts to identify her in 1995
proved unsuccessful and the case grew cold. The woman’s physical description, including surgical scars, was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and searched against missing persons nationwide. To date, no matches have been made through the NCIC entry.
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LIGHTING UP THE NIGHT
LOLITA HUCKABY
Ho! Ho! Ho! ’Tis the season to be merry
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BEAUFORT poiler alert! This is going to be a positive, upbeat column about the cool things that happened in our community over the weekend. It was OFFICIALLY the city of Beaufort’s Holiday Weekend and even Mother Nature got with the program by providing mild weather – shorts weather, some might say. There was that slight overcast on Sunday but who could complain? To be sure, some did complain – probably about all the increased traffic, especially on Sunday during the parade and if you were crazy enough to try and cross the Woods Bridge from Lady’s Island. But by most accounts, the Night on the Town activity was a huge draw, Saturday’s boat parade had the traditional dozen or so deckedout vessels (Congratulations to Mayor Stephen Murray and his family who took top honors for decorations) cruising the waterfront and Sunday’s parade was possibly the biggest in local history. When you have South Carolina’s No. 1 high school football team
SEE LOWDOWN PAGE A5
People pass by the City of Beaufort Christmas tree on their way to the sea wall prior to the start of the annual Christmas Boat Parade on Saturday evening at Henry C. Chambers Waterfront Park. The tree was lit Friday during Night on the Town. Bob Sofaly/The Island News
Conroy Center hosting panel on book challenges, bans
From staff reports In 1962, the Beaufort County School District faced a parental complaint calling for a ban of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. The novel was defended before the school board by storied Beaufort High School English teacher Gene Norris, mentor to a then 16-year-old high school junior named Pat Conroy. In his empowering description in My Reading Life of how his English teacher addressed and won this challenge against Salinger’s
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beloved coming-of-age story, Conroy also recalled Norris’s overarching message to his student and to all readers: “Literature tells us to be brave. It demands it of us.” As the Beaufort County School District is now in the midst of responding to an unprecedented challenge against 97 books in its library collections, the nonprofit Pat Conroy Literary Center will host a panel discussion on book challenges and bans, and the forc-
SEE PANEL PAGE A4
Committees vote to return first four books to shelves
From staff reports The first four Beaufort County School District (BCSD) Library Materials Review Committees voted Thursday, Dec. 1, at Bluffton Middle School to return the books they were reviewing to the library shelves. The committees voted unanimously to return The Handmaid’s Tale, The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and The Kite Runner to the shelves for all grade levels, while
CHRISTMAS
INSIDE
Photos from Night on the Town and annual Christmas Parades around Beaufort.
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voting to return Speak with a 4–1 vote. The four books the committees were reviewing were chosen first because the particular titles are also utilized in some high school Advanced Placement (AP) courses. The decisions could still face an appeal from the original complainant within seven days of the
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