And then there's the October 2006 case of wrecker driver Sergio Gonzalez. A bit of a ne'er-do-well with two DWIs and a 2002 felony drug conviction on his rap sheet, Gonzalez had a trace amount of cocaine metabolite in his system on an October morning in 2006 when his speeding tow truck T-boned a car carrying an elderly couple home from church.
The couple — Leon and Maurine Roberson — were killed, and Diepraam charged Gonzalez first with manslaughter. In September of last year, Gonzalez pleaded down to criminally negligent homicide. He was sentenced to six months in jail, but because he had already served that much time, he was released immediately. And then a month later, his case was suddenly resurrected by the DA's office and dismissed, the conviction expunged.
Eddie Seal
Hearing an assistant DA say that an incident similar to the one that killed Steve Morrison "did not rise to the level of a crime" redoubled Frank Morrison's efforts to win justice for his dead brother.
Chris Curry
Local defense attorney and blogger Mark Bennett believes the DA's dismissal of the Morrison case was "downright reasonable." "Prosecuting someone for an accident doesn't make the victim whole," he says. "In fact, it doesn't help the victim at all."
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The DA's office released a statement explaining the dismissal. Senior prosecutors, the statement read, had voiced concerns about Gonzalez's plea after it had been entered. According to the statement, while Gonzalez had been speeding, there was also evidence indicating that the Robersons had run a stop sign and were thus in part at fault. And thus, no matter his past convictions or his speeding (he was alleged to have been traveling 60 miles an hour in a 45 mph zone) or the traces of cocaine metabolite in his system, Gonzalez's driving did not demonstrate behavior "so egregious that it is a gross deviation from the standard of care an ordinary person would use."
The cocaine metabolite in his system was too minuscule to affect his driving, Gonzalez's attorney Todd Overstreet pointed out, or his client would have been charged with intoxication manslaughter. And 60 mph in a 45 zone was not seen as a gross deviation above an ordinary standard of care. What's more, the Robersons failed to yield. Thus, the statement continued, Gonzalez's actions "did not rise to the level of a criminal offense."
Despite the statement, Newman was flabbergasted with that decision. As he wrote on his blog, "While Miss Montgomery's talking on the cell phone got her a conviction and some nasty names from the D.A.'s Office, apparently the fact Mr. Gonzalez killed not one, but two people (who were leaving church) while speeding in a tow truck, and had cocaine metabolite in his system was somehow less egregious."
The statement from the DA's office went on to note that a review was ongoing of cases filed by Diepraam to determine how many others likewise "did not rise to the level of criminal offenses."
It was that very phrase that redoubled Frank Morrison's efforts to find justice for his dead brother.
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From the outset, Brent Mayr told the Morrison family that theirs was a difficult case. The problem, Mayr explained in an e-mail to the Morrison family, was the physics. He wrote that while HPD's evidence-gathering had been exemplary, the accident reconstructionist simply could not explain how Morrison's Saturn and Villegas-Vatres's Frontier ended up where they did. "[The] numbers kept coming back as inconsistent or impossible," Mayr wrote. One of the calculations posited that it was Morrison who had been traveling at high speed, which was inconsistent with witness statements. And the reconstructionist found no skid marks or other such indicators to help him come up with an estimate of Villegas-Vatres's speed. There was also the matter of Villegas-Vatres's allegedly faulty brakes. Due to the extensive front-end damage to the Frontier, it could never be proven if her brakes had truly failed.
Typically in these kinds of cases, prosecutors like to have multiple bad actions — running a red light while speeding and talking on a cell phone or applying makeup, say.
"We're looking for acts of negligence of any kind and then we're looking to see if there are more than one, what is the severity of any of those or the combination," says Evans. "It may be that each individual act might be ordinary negligence, but when you put them all together they meet that standard of a gross deviation from an ordinary standard of care."
Here, about all that Mayr had was that Villegas-Vatres had run a red light and killed a man, but nevertheless, Mayr was able to persuade a grand jury to indict. (Morrison believed, and still believes, that the fact that Villegas-Vatres was unlicensed should have been taken into account. Odd as it may seem, unless the driver could be proven to be unable to pass the driving test, as opposed to never having bothered to take it, driving without a license is not a per se moving violation, and thus moot in attempting to establish criminal negligence.)
Once she was behind bars, Mayr asked the Morrison family for their input on how they would like to see him pursue the case. He had warned them that proving criminally negligent homicide would be difficult and told them that Villegas-Vatres's attorney had requested to plea down to a misdemeanor deadly conduct rap. Mayr warned the Morrisons again that theirs would be a very hard case to try. Not only would the Morrisons have to relive the events that led to Steve's death, but, Mayr said, the chance of a guilty verdict was not very high.
