By Michael
A San Ramon, California, man is suspected of drunk driving and hit-and-run after police arrested him in the wake of what CBS 5 is calling a “drunken driving rampage.” The man, Cainan Schierholtz, is the brother of a pro baseball player for the San Francisco Giants, Nate Schierholtz.
Cainan Schierholtz was arrested on a recent Sunday morning, after, according to police, he hit a bicyclist, a pedestrian, a light pole and two cars.
The call came it at about 10 in the morning, with reports that a car was driving recklessly on Danville Boulevard, in Danville, California.
Then came the report that the driver allegedly hit a cyclist riding in a bike lane on the same road. Schierholtz allegedly did not stop, though, continuing down the road. Soon after that he allegedly hit a pedestrian who was standing in the bike lane.
Again, he didn’t stop to offer assistance or acknowledge either of the accidents. Instead, he allegedly continued driving, then swerved into traffic and hit a pickup truck. Not done yet, police said that he kept on driving still, until he veered up onto the sidewalk and rammed into a light pole, which fell to the ground.
Even after all of that, Schierholtz still kept driving, according to police. He rear-ended a sport utility vehicle, and then drove down a dead-end street.
The driver of the pick-up truck who had been previously hit followed Schierholtz, and then used his truck to pin him into the dead-end street so that he couldn’t get away.
According to a witness, the suspect’s airbags had deployed, so that he was awkwardly pinned in the car. And yet, despite even that, he was still driving.
Eventually Schierholtz realized he couldn’t get past the makeshift blockade, and he stopped in front of the pickup truck. The truck’s driver and several other bystanders pulled the suspect out of his car and restrained him until the police got there.
Schierholtz was booked on suspicion of four counts of DUI causing bodily harm, three counts of hit-and-run causing injury, two counts of hit-and-run causing property damage, and driving without a license, according to CBS. He was held on $350,000 bail.
By Michael
When there is a chance to affirm justice, and to see that a criminal gets their due, it is often the victim of a crime who raises the loudest voice and brings safety and security concerns into the public sphere.
That is the case in Tennessee, as a woman who had to struggle to survive after being hit by a drunk driver is raising the alarm and attempting to keep the perpetrator of that DUI behind bars.
Eveylen Turner, of Clarksville, Tennessee, was in a coma for three weeks after Joseph Chimahosky crashed into her. Chimahosky was drunk when he hit Turner. He was found guilty of the crime, and he was sentenced to three-and-a-half years in prison.
He has so far served five months of that sentence as part of his DUI penalties, but is now facing a parole board that will determine if he stays inside the joint or heads back out into the world.
With the parole hearing offering a place for Turner to state her views and potentially impact his stay in prison, Turner vowed to Channel 4 News in Nashville that she would do whatever it would take to keep Chimahosky behind bars.
“I don’t think he has served his time,” said the victim of the man’s drunk driving crash. “I think that he will get out and do the same again. The next person might not be as lucky as me.”
This was not Chimahosky’s first conviction for drunk driving, either. He had two previous convictions for DUI before his third, in the crash that almost killed an innocent person.
Turner made sure to be at Chimajosky’s parole hearing recently, bringing along pictures, X-rays and her medical bills, which totaled more than $1 million, as she built her case against him.
According to Channel 4 News, her and her family pleaded with the hearings officer to keep Chimahosky in jail.
Assistant District Attorney Chris Dotson held a similar position. “I have no faith in him getting out of here,” he said, “and endangering everybody in the roadway in this county.”
Chimahosky has been in trouble even while in jail. There are reports of an incident on four occasions. He told the parole officers that “not a day goes by I don’t think about my actions. As much as I want to, I can’t change what happened that night or what bad decisions I made that night, but I can change the decisions I make in the future.”
The parole board’s decision should take 3 to 4 weeks.
By Topher
After an eight-day trial, an Illinois jury has convicted Sandra Vasquez of aggravated drunken driving and reckless homicide in the deaths of five teens.
On February 11, 2007, about 30 teens were found partying in a Suburban Chicago home. A parent broke up the party and sent the teens home. Vasquez’s younger sister was at the party, and when Vasquez arrived to pick her up, seven other teens asked Vasquez to drive them home. Vasquez agreed, and the teens literally piled into her small sedan.
According to the Chicago Tribune, two teenagers were sharing the front passenger seat, four other teens were jammed into the back seat, and two other teenagers were on top of those teenagers’ laps.
A few minutes later, as the car was driving 70 mph down the highway, Vasquez swerved and then veered into a light pole. The two teens in the front of the car, and the two laying on the laps of the teens in back died instantly. One of the other teens died eight days later from his injuries. Vasquez and the other three teens, including her sister, also suffered injuries.
Vasquez admitted that she may have had as many as four drinks, but said she was not drunk. Chicago Breaking News reports that expert testimony showed that her blood alcohol level could have been as high as 0.124, putting her well over the legal limit. However, her blood alcohol level could have been as low as 0.04, the defense argued, because her liver was damaged in the accident, making testing difficult.
Vasquez was arrested and charged with 10 counts of aggravated drunken driving leading to death, six counts of aggravated drunken driving causing serious bodily harm, and five counts of reckless homicide. She spent the three years between the accident and trial out on bail by posting her parents’ home as collateral. She has lived “like a saint” since the accident, according to the Beacon News, spending her time taking care of her children, four and eight years old, and adhering to the rules of her probation.
The jury finally delivered its verdict on the crash on Wednesday, June 30: Guilty on 21 counts. Some members of the jury were visibly crying, clearly upset by what they considered their civic duty, reported the Naperville Sun. Most of the families of the victims consider the guilty verdict to be justice, but feel sympathy for Vasquez.
Vasquez’s attorney points out, however, that a woman trying to do the right thing by clearly intoxicated teenagers is also a victim of this terrible situation, and plans to ask for probation based on extreme circumstances. The District Attorney has already said that he will not cooperate with this request.
Ms. Vasquez’s bail has already been revoked, though she was given the chance to call her two children before being sent to jail. She will be sentenced in August and could face a maximum sentence of up to twenty-eight years behind bars.
By Topher
A recent DUI case in San Diego was declared a mistrial after a single juror held off from deciding whether the defendant was behind the wheel when a car struck another vehicle and killed four people, according to 10 News.
Deanna Fridley was on trial in the case in which the four were killed in Pala Casino, California. Fridley claimed that she was not the driver of the car that got into the deadly December 14, 2007, accident, and one of the jurors in the case would not conclude that it was her, leading to the mistrial.
The jurors in the case informed the judge that they had reached an 11-1 deadlock. They had been apart for a holiday break, and on their return they announced that they could not come to a unanimous agreement on the charges.
Fridley was also accused of DUI causing injury and misdemeanor driving on a suspended license.
Judge Runston Maino, serving in the case, declined to enact a motion by the prosecution to replace the juror with an alternate juror. “You haven’t failed as jurors; you haven’t failed as individuals,” he told the jurors in light of their lack of unanimity.
Fridley, 26, faced four 15-years-to-life sentences if she had been convicted in the case. Her defense attorney, James Boyd, addressed the media after the mistrial was declared, saying that he was “really happy” with the result. “My question,” he said, “is how is it that 11 of them actually thought she was driving? It’s a real who-done-it. Was she driving or not?”
A retrial of the case could come in six to eight months, and there will be a status update in July.
According to prosecutors, Fridley was driving over 85 miles per hour and swerved over the lane divider before crashing into and killing Luis De Santiago, his wife Lina, and Luis Baez and his wife Rubi. They also claimed that Fridely had spent the day smoking meth and drinking with a friend. Fridley was allegedly driving a GMC Yukon, while the victims were in a Toyota Camry.
Fridley testified that she had switched seats with her friend before the crash. The friend, Anthony Boles, denies this claim.
Fridley will remain in custody, and her bail is set at $1 million.
By Michael
Nichole Santos celebrated her twenty-first birthday just six months ago. Taking her newfound drinking privilege to new extremes, between then and now, she has been arrested for DUI four times.
That’s a rate of one DUI per month since February.
The most recent DUI ended with a dramatic accident. The car that Santos was driving left the road and came to rest 285 feet later. On the way there, it knocked down three light poles.
Santos was driving home from the bar at the time of the accident, and she was driving drunk.
This marked her fourth DUI in as many months, according to Clarksville police. Her first DUI arrest was on February 2, her second was on April 10 and the third was on May 21. The latest arrest came on June 27.
This was not Santos’ first trouble with DUI. In 2007, when Santos was just 18, she was convicted of her first DUI.
Citizens in Clarksville are concerned about how Santos’ has been able to repeatedly offend. “It really shows we need to tighten our laws,” said Mothers Against Drunk Driving Tennessee executive director Laura Dial. “A system that allows that to happen is flawed.”
Dial continued by saying that the Santos case highlights the need for a mandatory interlock law in Tennessee. Such laws would force repeat offenders to have ignition locking devices on their cars that test a driver’s blood-alcohol content before turning the car on.
Tennessee recently passed a version of an ignition interlock law that made them optional.
Another DUI law lets judges in DUI cases label repeat DUI offenders as “dangerous.” In these cases, the judge can set no bond, or set the bond as extraordinarily high, to keep those repeat offenders behind bars. This is not a mandatory law and is applied at the judges’ discretion.
Speaking about the current legal situation, Dial said “You get arrested for a DUI, you do a little time in jail, you get told not to drive. That doesn’t work with a DUI offender.”
In Santos’ case, she was able to make her $5,000 bond hours after she was arrested, and was back home by the next Monday.
Santos hasn’t been convicted in any of her DUI arrests, as she awaits hearings in each one.
By Michael
In Missouri, a man who has repeatedly been charged with DUI received a 28-year prison sentence after he killed three people in a drunk driving accident.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch is reporting that Newton Keene had avoided severe repercussions for DUI convictions in the past. Keene, however, was convicted and sentenced for three counts of aggravated drunken driving resulting in death and one count of drunken driving causing bodily harm. The sentence included a plea bargain negotiated by Keene which resulted in the dropping of lesser charges.
The 28-year sentence represents the maximum penalty for the crimes in question. Keene has to serve at least 85 percent of the term, which comes to about 24 years, before he can be eligible for parole.
Keene was driving the wrong way on the Interstate at 2 a.m. in the morning when he struck and killed Tawanda Jackson, her friend Jon Moss and her son Arnold. Her daughter, Takia, who was eleven-years-old at the time, survived the crash. They were returning home from the funeral of Jackson’s grandmother.
Keene registered a blood-alcohol content of .24 percent, which is three times the legal limit. Takia was very emotional as she listened to the charges announced at the sentencing. Keene declined to make a statement.
When the accident occurred, Keene had already been convicted and jailed for his fifth DUI. He was arrested twice after that, though police did not seek felony charges in those cases. He went to prison in 2000, on a five-year felony DUI sentence, but was released after just 120 days.
Speaking of the maximum penalty in the case, Madison County State’s Attorney William Mudge said, “This is the only way to keep the public safe from Mr. Keene.”
A relative of the victims, Thomas Marble, had consented to the plea deal. The family did also, however, express their discontent that the maximum penalty was not higher for such an offense.
The Post-Dispatch has featured a series of investigations last year highlighting the problem of repeat offenders slipping through the cracks. According to the article, these investigations led to improved legislation to close that gap.
By Michael
In October of 2008, Pennsylvania state senator James J. Rhoades was driving down the highway when a car swerved in front of him. The two cars collided, and the injuries that Rhoades sustained proved fatal. He died the next morning.
The driver of the car that swerved in front of him was Thomas P. Senavitis, of Kunkletown. Senavitis was sentenced recently, having been found guilty of blood-alcohol content of .16 or higher and four counts of recklessly endangering another person.
For these offenses, he was charged with 200 days to 23 months in jail, according to an article in the Republican Herald. Having served that time while awaiting sentencing, Senavitis was immediately released from prison and paroled.
Senavitis did not offer many words about the case, or his sentence and release from jail. When he was asked how he felt about it, he replied, “I’m not sure yet.” With him was his wife, Dolores.
Asked what he was going to do next, Monroe County Chief Public Defender Wieslaw T. Niemoczynski said, “He’s going to check into the parole office and then go on with the rest of his life.” The parole period could last as long as 23 months.
The trial took four days in mid-March. A jury found Senavitis guilty of the charges, but did not find him guilty of felony vehicular homicide and aggravated assault, which are far more serious charges.
Senavitis must also pay a $1,000 fine, complete a drug and alcohol treatment program and have his driver’s license revoked for one year.
James J. Rhoades was a Republican from Mahanoy City, who began serving in office in 1980.
The 66-year-old had served seven terms in the Pennsylvania senate. He was actively involved in education initiatives, and had also been a teacher, a coach and a school principal before entering into public service. He was the longtime chairman of the Senate Education Committee.
He had been on his way to a function at a local high school at the time of the accident. His wife survived the accident, though she suffered major injuries.
By Michael
Joshua Salayich cried as he asked for leniency from the judge who would sentence him for DUI in the October death of a runner from Utah. The family members of the victim were also in the courthouse, and they had described the pain of losing Jeremy Kunz, a father and youth leader from Kamas, Utah.
The sentence handed down to Salayich was 7 to 20 years in prison. This was slightly more harsh than the 6 to 20 years recommended by parole and probation officials, reports the Reno Gazette-Journal.
Kunz was participating in one leg of a relay race from Valley of Fire State Park to the Red Rock Resort when Salayich hit him while driving at 4:30 a.m.
An eyewitness, another runner in the race, said that Kunz had tried to jump out of the way of the Nissan Altima that would strike and ultimately kill him.
The car rolled over in a cloud of dust. When it finally came to a stop in a lot, the driver got out, grabbed a few things, asked the witness not to call the cops, and walked away.
As a part of Salayich’s plea deal to plead guilty, prosecutors agreed to drop the felony charge of leaving the scene of the crash. Salayich was close to his home in Henderson, Nevada, when the crash occurred.
According to prosecutors, Salayich’s blood-alcohol content was measured at 0.26 percent following the crash, or over three times the legal limit.
“Jeremy’s death was entirely avoidable,” said his wife, Melinda. Jeremy left behind three children. He was what his family called an active community and family member. “My children will not be able to feel their daddy’s arms around them,” she continued in court, adding that she forgave Salayich but that she felt he should still be punished.
“I want the consequences of his actions to be fully applied to him,” she went on. “His actions and their consequences have been fully applied to me. Mercy cannot rob justice.”
“There are no words to say how sorry I am for this,” Salayich said in court. “All it takes is one horrible decision. For the rest of your life you have to live with that.”
By Michael
John Patrick Barton was convicted of DUI three times in the last 13 years. The Texas courts sent him to jail on weekends, put him on probation and even sent him to state prison for ten months. They required him even to use an ignition interlock system while driving a car.
None of these measures prevented Barton from killing two members of a young family when he got behind the wheel of a car while intoxicated and proceeded to rear end their vehicle.
Barton drove his wife’s Mazda into the family’s car, it went into a spin that would leave Kandace Hull, 33, and her 13-year-old daughter Autumn Caudle dead. All five members of Hull’s family were in the car. Her husband, daughter and son were injured but survived the crash, reports the Dallas Morning News.
“It’s just kind of like somebody put a concrete block on your chest and you don’t know what to do,” said Linda Agee, a friend of the family.
A witness to the event estimated that Barton was traveling 80 miles per hour when he passed her on the highway. “He was swerving in and out of the lanes, and I thought to myself that this guy was definitely drunk,” said Laura Meade. She would see the crash happen soon after, when Barton apparently swerved to avoid the HOV lane.
Barton worked as a computer technician. He was paroled in 2009 after serving ten months out of a 3-year sentence in prison for DWI.
The results of the blood-alcohol test on Barton will not be available immediately, according to officials.
Barton’s previous record with DWI convictions raise the charges in the case to the level of felony. And because the crime that he allegedly committed was clearly dangerous to human life, officials are able to pursue the murder charges.
If convicted of the charges, Barton faces life in prison. His license was, however, still valid at the time of the deadly accident.
Friends and coworkers describe the Hull family as tight knit, and involved in sports and activities around the community.
Barton was also hospitalized, but his injuries were not as serious, and he will soon be transferred to a Texas jail.
By Topher
Dick’s Drive-In is a Seattle fast-food institution, offering quick, cheap burgers, fries and shakes to an adoring public.
The Lake City Dick’s recently took a big hit on March 25, when a customer crashed straight into the drive-in’s front window, shattering it and causing the restaurant to close for more than a week.
The driver of the Ford Explorer that rammed Dick’s Drive-In has now been charged with driving under the influence, according to the Seattle PI. The suspect, Colin John Sandwith, who recently retired after 41 years at the University of Washington, has plead not guilty to those charges.
According to police, Sandwith collided into the front of the restaurant at around 9 p.m. on a Thursday evening, causing damage to its countertop, tiled wall and window. After the collision, Sandwith got out of the car and said that he had accidentally hit the gas pedal instead of the brake, investigators say.
The only injury came when a witness saw the SUV coming towards the restaurant and hurt his knee leaping out of the way. He was not taken to the hospital after receiving attention from local rescue.
Sandwith was taken to the police station and processed. He had no prior DUI record, and had received little more than traffic tickets in the past. His pretrial hearing for the DUI is scheduled for early May.
Dick’s representatives did not comment on the accident or provide an estimate of the damages caused in the accident. According to the article, plywood covered most of the windows, and a sign apologized for the closure and inconvenience.
The estimated closure time of the drive-in is about a little more than a week. The last recorded closure of the restaurant location for any period of time occurred when a fire started in the French fry cooker. The restaurant shut down for two weeks, and returned to business as usual soon after that.
Dick’s has been around since 1954, when the first Seattle location opened. The Lake City restaurant involved in the DUI crash has been slinging fries and burgers to hungry Pacific Northwesterners since 1963. There are currently five locations across Seattle.
