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COLUMBIA, S.C. (QUEEN CITY NEWS) — There’s an old, brick government office off Highway 151 between Hartsville and Darlington, just past the Darlington Dragway.
The office has sat there for as long as I can remember.
It’s always housed the local Department of Motor Vehicles office, and the S.C. Highway Patrol has its small Troop 5, Post A office tucked into a corner of the back of the building.
For those of us who grew up around there, that building was the scariest place on Earth when it was time to start the adventure of becoming a licensed driver.
All the 15 and 16-year-olds around Hartsville, and probably Darlington, knew it as the last place you dared take the road test to get your beginner’s permit.
The problem was, it was the only DMV anywhere around.
There was one examiner all the kids told horror stories about. She was THE one you didn’t want if you ever wanted a license. At least that was the consensus among us unlicensed wannabe drivers who dreamed of the freedom the DMV stood in the way of.
Almost all of my buddies failed their road tests there. And I did, too.
I showed up at that old, brick government office around September of 1994 for the road test. Everything was going great until I signaled the left turn onto Swift Creek Road. “Let’s do a three-point turn,” the skills test examiner barked at me. I dreaded that part.
It was the third rail of the exam. And like all the wannabe licensed driver forefathers who came before me, I did not survive.
“Try again, son,” was the last thing I remember the lady – who held my four-wheeled freedom in her hands – saying as she scribbled something on her clipboard and we got out of the car in the back lot of the Hartsville-Darlington DMV office.
Years later, I realized that the road test examiner wasn’t the problem; we were. She was the “bad guy” because she wasn’t just giving us those beginner’s permits. She made us earn them.
That road skills examiner lady is exactly who – and what – I thought of when a tipster first told me the story of the on-the-clock love affair between a pair of troopers at that exact office a few months ago. The pair turned that taxpayer-owned patrol office into a love shack, was the story.
READ: Office of Professional Responsibility investigation into Lance Corporal Hailey Bennett
As with many other news tips I’ve fielded over the years, I expected the real story behind this case to be nothing like reality. When I got the copy of the S.C. Department of Public Safety’s internal affairs investigation and the audio recordings of the interviews from the case file, the original tip turned out to be spot-on: a patrol supervisor and his subordinate had struck up an extramarital affair, indeed.
The patrol’s investigation also found several of their sex romps happened on-duty inside that small Troop 5, Post A office tucked into the back corner of the Hartsville-Darlington DMV office. An office where many broken-hearted teenagers, still today, walk by in shame after a failed trip out to Swift Creek Road.
READ: Office of Professional Responsibility investigation into Sgt. Jacob Rodgers
This patrol case led us to uncover three other South Carolina lawmen charged with misconduct in office, accused of having on-the-clock sex in 2025.
The first case we found happened in Georgetown County in February, the second happened in McCormick County a few weeks later, and the most recent prosecution was launched when S.C. Law Enforcement Division agents charged a Cayce, S.C. officer with having sex on duty.
All three officers were charged with misconduct in office.
Neither of the two troopers involved in that Hartsville-Darlington patrol sex scandal were investigated criminally, and the head of the SCDPS told me that was on purpose: the agency didn’t believe anything criminal happened.
Our ‘Internal Affairs’ investigation explores the disparity in the prosecution of law enforcers who spend taxpayer time in sexual escapades instead of serving the public.