Man sentenced to life in prison for killing college student who mistook his car for Uber

A South Carolina man was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday for the 2019 abduction and murder of a 21-year-old college student who mistook his car for her Uber ride. The jury took a little more than an hour to find Nathaniel Rowland guilty of killing Samantha Josephson, a University of South Carolina student who disappeared from Columbia's Five Points entertainment district in March 2019.

"Her dreams were my dreams, and her death was my death. I close my eyes, and I feel what she endured at his hands," the victim's mother, Marci Josephson, said during the sentencing phase of Rowland's trial Tuesday. The student from Robbinsville, New Jersey, got into Rowland's car thinking it was an Uber ride that would take her back to her apartment, prosecutors said. Instead, she found herself trapped because Rowland had the childproof locks on, investigators said. She was never seen alive again.