The Morrisons were undaunted. After discussing the matter in a family meeting, the Morrisons voted and it was unanimous. Frank Morrison told Mayr they wanted Villegas-Vatres to be prosecuted to the hilt, even if that meant she would be deported back to a potentially dangerous situation in El Salvador. "That way at least if she was found not guilty, she would have gone through the judicial system and had a fair trial," he says. "We would rather have seen that than to have her plead down to a misdemeanor and pay a fine or something. And we all felt that she was trying hard to get that plea bargain, because that T-visa would have been revoked if she had been convicted of a felony. They would have deported her. And my niece and nephew and both my sisters and I decided we would go for it all."
Like so many victims' families, the Morrisons wanted to see the perpetrator's demeanor. "We were gonna be able to see how this woman reacted," he says. "Did she hang her head? Was she sorry? Was she remorseful, or was this just another day for her?"
Courtesy of Sharon Smith
Steve Morrison was killed instantly when Rosa Villegas-Vatres's Nissan Frontier ran a red light and plowed into his Saturn at the corner of Westpark and Hillcroft.
Chris Curry
Sharon Smith, Steve Morrison's sister, said that a Houston policeman told her it was unlikely that the driver of the car that killed her brother would even get a traffic ticket.
Related Content
More About
"We hear that a lot, especially in these types of cases where nobody got up in the morning and said, 'I think I'm gonna go kill somebody today,'" says Evans. "The families really want to know that there's remorse, that somebody understands the impact of what they've done."
Evans says that unfortunately, the criminal justice system by its very nature is ill equipped to allow for such gestures. Evans supposes that most defense attorneys would tell their clients not to contact the victims' families or to send a letter expressing remorse because that could be perceived as an expression of culpability.
But in this case that issue was moot, as Villegas-Vatres's day in court would never come. Last October, an extremely apologetic Mayr called Morrison to tell them that his superiors had reviewed the file and ordered the case dismissed. "He said, 'I'm so sorry to tell you this, but I am having to call many, many families and tell them the same thing. The current administration has said to get rid of these cases. It's illegal, start wipin' 'em out. The evidence isn't there.'"
(Civil negligence is a much easier standard to prove in court, but after estimating that Villegas-Vatres was likely not a wealthy woman, the family decided to forgo that option.)
"People make mistakes — that's why they call them accidents," says Frank Morrison. "I can live with accidents. Mistakes happen. But what really eats at me is that this woman is from El Salvador, she is here on a visa, she is not licensed to drive in the state of Texas, and for them to say that it doesn't rise to the level of criminal negligent homicide for her to drive a motor vehicle and kill somebody...She had no business driving a car."
While he took no part in this case, defense attorney Mark Bennett has another view. "A woman with no alcohol or drugs in her system ran a red light and killed a man. She says that her brakes failed, and there is no evidence to the contrary. She may or may not have been going faster than 20 mph (that's a solid whack; it's not hard to envision a 20 mph side impact killing a driver.) Charges against her are dropped. Put that way, with the wholly-irrelevant ("an immigrant," "no insurance"), the probably irrelevant ("no license")...filtered out, the DA's actions sounds downright reasonable."
Steve Morrison's death was a tragedy, Bennett continues, but not all tragedies are or should be crimes, nor do all accidents, even those that cause death, constitute criminal negligence. "Prosecuting someone for an accident doesn't make the victim whole; in fact, it doesn't help the victim at all."
_____________________
Now that Catherine "Clutch" Evans (or so reads the nameplate on her desk) is the new chief of the District Attorney's Vehicular Crimes Section, she says that it is her intent to see that roller-coaster rides like that the Morrison family endured, with charges filed and dropped and refiled and dropped again, will be a thing of the past.
"The one concrete thing I would say we are going to do differently [from the Rosenthal administration] is that we want to have a full investigation so we don't have to shift courses so dramatically," she says. "It's incredibly difficult for the families involved, and it's really not fair to anybody unless there's some really clear and compelling need to do otherwise."
Evans says that the information that is readily available in the immediate aftermath of a fatal accident, before the accident reconstructionists make their calculations, generally isn't the complete picture. "You go out on a scene and you see the wreckage, you see what appears to be horrible damage, and even as a layperson I can say, 'Wow, that was obviously a high-speed collision.' And you get a witness account that says they were going really fast. That's valid information, but until you get an accident reconstructionist to come forward and give you a number, and then maybe you find out it wasn't how it appeared. Maybe speed wasn't an issue."
