Left: Freddie Grant; Right: Adriana Laster. (Richland County)
A convicted South Carolina murderer has been charged with murder again — this time over the killing of a woman whose body was discovered in a sand pit nearly 13 years after she went missing.
Freddie Grant, 64, stands accused of two counts of domestic violence and one count each of kidnapping and murder over the 2011 death and disappearance of his then-girlfriend, Adriana Laster, 28.
The dead woman had, in the months leading up to her still-mysterious death, been the victim of domestic violence committed by the defendant, currently an inmate in state prison.
“This was a long time coming,” Richland County Sheriff Leon Lott said in comments reported by The Times and Democrat. “We knew that he was responsible for Adriana Laster’s death but it was just a matter of finding her body.”
The charges against Grant were filed on Feb. 1 in Kershaw County, according to The State. In warrants, Laster expressed a fear that her then-boyfriend was trying to kill her. After walking to church one Sunday morning in September 2011, she was never seen alive again. Her family formally reported her as a missing person in March 2012.
Laster’s remains were discovered in early January after a worker at a quarry in Elgin made the shocking discovery while unloading sand that had been moved by an excavator at a mine owned by Tri D Materials. The identification of those remains occurred roughly a week later.
“I just feel now that to us that she’s free, and the butterfly that she has always wanted to be, she is that butterfly,” Phyllis Horn, who raised Laster’s daughter, Crystal, and is her paternal grandmother, told Columbia-based CBS affiliate WLTX last month. “She was maybe 17 when she had Crystal, but Crystal was the love of her life.”
Crystal Laster tried living with her mother after she moved from Florida to South Carolina to be with Grant in 2009 — but was back with her grandmother after a week or so, according to Columbia-based NBC and The CW affiliate WIS-TV.
“She said, ‘I do not like him.’ She said ‘he’s just so arrogant’ and that he didn’t have no patience with her or her mom,” Horn told the TV station.
In March 2011, Grant brutally attacked Laster, slamming her face into the side of a brick wall and then dragging her into his car. He was arrested the month after that and convicted of criminal domestic violence in July 2011. He was sentenced to 30 days in jail and a small fine.
Months later, Laster was likely dead.
Richland County Coroner Naida Rutherford identified the grim quarry find as fragmentary skeletal remains. The identification was made through the use of DNA at the sheriff’s office’s crime lab, the State reported. Still, the manner of death has remained elusive.
“That requires a complete set of human remains and we just don’t have that currently,” Rutherford said in comments reported by the paper.
Elgin Mayor Melissa Emmons told the State that local police had warrants prepared for Grant’s arrest for over two years.
Long-suspected in Laster’s death, the defendant pleaded guilty in 2013 to murdering Gabrielle “Gabbiee” Swainson, 15, after abducting her from her home in Columbia, in Richland County, in August 2012. Under the terms of the plea deal, Grant led investigators to where he dumped Swanson’s body — in exchange for a 30-year sentence and for prosecutors dropping charges against his daughter, Dominique Grant, who was previously charged with being an accessory after the fact.
In comments to the State, Lott, the Richland County Sheriff described Grant as a “monster that continues to haunt this community.”
The defendant has also been connected to a third murder.
Over a decade ago, the Kershaw County Sheriff’s Office named Grant a person of interest in the murder of Daniel Lee Wood, 36, who was shot and killed in Lugoff during an argument in October 2011.
“The man who was shot and killed, his address is across the street from Freddie Grant’s,” since-retired Kershaw County sheriff Jim Matthews told WIS-TV in 2012. “He wasn’t shot there, he was shot someplace else, so we feel like they knew each other. And that is really all I’m prepared to talk about right now.”
Lott, for his part, appeared to endorse the triple murder theory.
“We’re not going to stop until we find every victim that Freddie Grant had,” the Richland County sheriff said last month.
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