Olanta man get 45 years in prison for neighbor’s murder

By Jody Barr
WBTW News 13 Reporter
Published: June 26, 2008

An Olanta man was sentenced to 45 years in prison Thursday after he pleaded guilty to assaulting his neighbor and setting her home on fire to cover the crime, 12th Circuit Solicitor Ed Clements III said.

Nathaniel Hickson, 20, of 427 S. Hood St., faced murder, first-degree arson and first-degree burglary charges in the Jan. 8, 2007, death of 32-year-old Samantha H. Brayboy.

Circuit Court Judge Howard King of Sumter handed down the sentence after 12th Circuit Assistant Solicitor Bob Wells asked the judge to set aside the maximum penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole Hickson faced.

Wells said the plea agreement was negotiated with Hickson’s attorney, Michael Bell of Florence.

Hickson was out of jail on bond for first-degree assault with intent to commit criminal sexual conduct, which he was charged with in September 2006 in connection with another victim in the Olanta area.

As part of the deal, the solicitor’s office agreed to drop the 2006 charge against Hickson.

Bell told King his client admitted his guilt from the beginning and wanted to resolve the case.

Deputies said Hickson watched Brayboy leave her residence at 503 S. Hood St. to take her two daughters to school the day of the crime, then entered her home through a window, according to Florence County Sheriff’s Office reports. Brayboy returned to find the suspect in a closet in her home.

In his statement to investigators, Hickson said he went to the Brayboy’s home to “plunder” and confessed to finding and taking $3 from a counter top in the home.

He told them he hit Brayboy in the head several times with a lamp, leaving her inside a garden tub, then started a fire in the home in an effort to hide evidence of the assault, investigators said.

Brayboy was barely breathing when medics found her and rushed her to a local hospital, where she was pronounced dead.

Florence County Coroner M.G. “Bubba” Matthews said the official cause of Brayboy’s death was smoke inhalation. But an autopsy performed at Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston showed evidence of foul play.

Florence County Sheriff’s Arson Investigator Bert Turner conducted an extensive investigation of the crime scene, with assistance from the State Law Enforcement Division.

Investigators found a pair of Hickson’s shoes with blood and traces of a petroleum-based accelerant, the same substance found inside the Brayboy home, on them. They arrested Hickson, who later told investigators he stole Brayboy’s credit card from her purse. Investigators found that credit card on a second search of his home.

News13 spoke with Hickson’s aunt, Wanda McFadden, who lived next door to the Brayboys, the day deputies arrested her nephew.

McFadden said she was shocked and saddened by the arrest.

“Because the lady next door, she was a decent lady, real nice. Her and her husband both were good people and they tended to their children a lot. They were all about their kids, you call tell that, it was all about their children and they were good people and I couldn’t understand why somebody would do that,“ McFadden told News13.

McFadden said she was home when investigators said Hickson killed Brayboy, but said she never heard her nephew leave the home.

At his hearing Thursday, McFadden asked King for leniency and said she felt partly responsible for what happened.

“If I could have stopped it that day I would have stopped it, even if it took me to take his life and go to jail for it, I would have stopped it,” she said.

Hickson asked Brayboy’s family for forgiveness.

“Not a day goes by I don’t think about what I’ve done. I’m sorry and I hope they accept my apology. I ask you to have mercy on me,” he told King.

Samantha Brayboy’s husband, Gary, offered a $10,000 reward for any information that would lead to the arrest of additional suspects in the weeks following his wife’s murder.

Investigators said Hickson acted alone in the crime, but during the plea hearing, Bell said he didn’t believe Hickson committed the crime on his own.

Neither of Samantha and Gary Brayboy’s daughters, ages 7 and 13, attended the hearing Thursday.

Wells read a letter the Brayboys’ 13-year-old daughter wrote to the court describing the final minutes she spent with her mother the morning she died.

“I got dressed that morning and my mom did my hair,” she wrote in the letter. “I was wearing a new outfit and she had me wear her bracelet. I kissed and hugged her good-bye and that was the last time I saw her.”

Hickson will spend the next several days at the Florence County Detention Center in Effingham before he’s sent to Columbia for state corrections officers to assign him a prison cell.

— Morning News Staff Writer Jamie Rogers contributed to this report.