COLUMBIA, S.C. — Documents released by court officials show potentially life-saving acts by a convicted murderer who recently received a reduced sentence.
The documents were obtained by News19 on Thursday following an order by the South Carolina Supreme Court to release and unseal documents related to the reduced sentence of Jeroid Price.
Price was convicted of a 2002 murder and was serving a minimum sentence of 35 years in prison. However, court documents, including two exhibits and an addendum, documented incidents where Price either aided the Department of Corrections or potentially saved lives.
One case was in January of 2017 and involved Price, according to another inmate, saving a corrections officer from an attack by multiple inmates and helping him escape attacks in a prison wing at Lieber Correction Institution.
The fellow inmate said in his statement that while he was rewarded for his own actions, "Mr. Price was and is being punished for saving" the officer.
Another similar case was also reported in 2006 when Price assisted another prison officer. In a statement from a corrections officer who witnessed the incident, Price is said to have helped an officer who was letting a cellmate into a cell. An inmate is said to have pushed the door open and pursued the officer as she attempted to escape an apparent attack.
The statement said the officer tripped near the sally port door where the inmate stood over her with a broomstick and nearly attacked.
That's when the exhibit states Price "came out of nowhere and tackled" the inmate and held him there until help arrived.
The report states that the corrections officer "stated to me several times that she wanted Inmate Price to receive an award, a time reduction, for saving her life."
"That's why I'm writing this because this is what she wanted and what I feel Inmate Jeroid Price deserves," the statement concludes.
A third included item, an addendum, also credits Price for notifying the Department of Corrections that an inmate, Jimmy Lee Causey, had escaped from prison. The addendum is not attributed and provides little detail. However, previous News19 coverage shows that he escaped from South Carolina Department of Corrections facilities at least twice - once from Broad River Correctional Institution in 2004 and again from Lieber Correctional many years later.
The information was all presented in a sentence reduction request that ended with Price's sentence being reduced from a minimum of 35 years to 19 years - well below the 30-year minimum required by state law.
However, his release has led to controversy since neither the Attorney General's Office nor the victim's family was notified.
Price was convicted in 2003 of the 2002 killing of Carl Smalls, a University of North Carolina student who was at a nightclub in Columbia.