This case sets a very dangerous legal precedent.
Ethan Couch killed 4 and injured 10.
Ethan's BAC was 3x the legal limit 3 HOURS AFTER the crash!!
Ethan also had Valium in his system at the time of the crash in addition to alcohol.
Ethan had only traveled 2 blocks from his home before crashing ... and still had reached the speed of 70mph (in a 40 zone) in only 2 blocks.
Parties serving alcohol to minors were frequently held at the Couch home. That's where that night started. Then, Couch and 7 of his friends piled into the 2012 Ford F300 owned and registered to Fred Couch's Company, Cleburne Metal Works LLC, and attempted to unsuccessfully steal beer from a convenient store before heading to Walmart where they stole several cases of beer.
In one of the civil suits filed by the parents of one of the teens that was riding in the back of the truck, Sergio Molina, alleges Couch was not paying attention to the road and may have been texting or talking on his cell phone at the time of the crash. Molina has already exceeded $600,000 in medical care. The family is suing for $20 million. Molina remains in a vegetative state.
In February of this year, in the town Lakeside, northwest of Fort Worth, police found Couch with a 12-ounce can of beer and a 1.75-liter bottle of vodka in the early hours and gave him two citations - one for being a minor in possession of alcohol, the other for consuming alcohol as a minor.
Dr. Gary Miller, a psychologist testifying for Couch, said the teen suffered from "affluenza," and cited an incident when the boy, then 14, was found by police in a parked pickup truck with a naked girl. He was ticketed but went unpunished.
A psychologist testified that the teen's parents had a volatile, unhealthy relationship and argued frequently in front of their son. The psychologist said Couch's parents used their son to hurt each other after a contentious divorce and never taught him basic lessons for interacting with others.
His father "does not have relationships, he takes hostages," Miller said, and he described the teen's mother as a desperate, manipulative woman.
At Ethan Couch's sentence hearing held in Fort Worth on December 10, 2013, Tarrant County Assistant District Attorney Richard Alpert proposed that the defendant be incarcerated for twenty years. In addressing Judge Boyd, Alpert said, "If the boy, who is from an affluent family, is cushioned by the family's wealth, there can be no doubt that he will be in another courthouse one day blaming the leniency he received here." The prosecutor pointed out that inmates in Texas who needed it received drug and alcohol treatment.
http://www.courthousenews.c.../60991.htm
Teen witnesses account of the scene that night
Just before they ended up on the same road, Ethan Couch and Amanda Parr chose two separate paths.
Couch — full of everclear, vodka and Miller Lite — left one party June 15 and hopped in the driver's seat of his pickup. A group of teenagers jumped in, too.
Parr, then 18, and her friend Deandra Sullivan got in a car and left a graduation reception where they said they chose not to drink.
Following a caravan of a few friends, Parr turned on Burleson-Retta Road. Parr said they saw bright headlights, and "a bunch of chaos."
Couch had wrecked and killed four pedestrians – three good Samaritans and a disabled motorist. Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson, a former accident investigator, said the area became "like a war zone." The details in the investigative report are gruesome.
In all the wreckage, bodies, vehicles and debris, Parr found Sergio Molina, then 15, lying in the road near a vehicle.
"He wasn't moving," Parr said. "His eyes were open, kind of, and then they were shut."
Sullivan said they tried to talk to Molina, who had been thrown from the bed of the pickup.
"He couldn't make any words," Sullivan said. "He was breathing — he just couldn't do anything other than that."
Parr held Molina's head and prayed for him. At some point, another teen came up to her and said the boy was his friend Sergio. He then began mumbling about sunglasses and wandering around.
She heard screaming, crying and saw all the wrecked vehicles. She said she stayed with Molina until the ambulance arrived.
"It felt like forever," she said.
Parr and Sullivan said they have had to learn to cope with what they saw. They said Thursday that they were both shocked by the 10-year probation sentence that Couch got from a juvenile judge. Especially after all the carnage they saw that night.
"Witnessing the accident was worse on me than his punishment was on him," Sullivan said.
Parr said she still prays for the victims, and that God will judge Couch. But the crash scene still haunts her.
"The people who are speaking up for Ethan Couch and saying he's just a kid — they didn't see the events and how it took a toll," Parr said.
http://crimeblog.dallasnews...ence.html/
The Accident
The sheriff said that from witness statements, reconstructions of the accident and information from data recorders on the vehicles, his investigators have determined that the pickup truck driven by Couch was westbound on Burleson-Retta Road, moving at 68 to 70 mph, when the truck clipped the rear end of Mitchell's SUV, which was in the culvert to the right of the westbound lane.
Couch "had to be working hard, really laying it on the accelerator, to get that pickup moving that fast that quickly," Anderson said, noting again that the teens had been at a residence "just a few hundred yards" east of the accident site.
Couch's truck then struck the four pedestrians standing together in front of the SUV, killing them instantly, Anderson said.
Couch's pickup then struck the rear of Jennings' white Chevrolet Silverado, which was parked on the right shoulder of the westbound lane, just west of Mitchell's SUV. The impact propelled the Silverado — in which two boys, 12 and 13, were sitting — westward and across both the westbound and eastbound lanes of Burleson-Retta Road. The Silverado then clipped a red Volkswagen Beetle headed east on the same road.
The Silverado came to rest off to the side of the eastbound lane. The Volkswagen veered off the road on the eastbound lane side, before moving back into the eastbound lane where it stopped.
The two boys in Jennings' Silverado were taken to Cook Children's Medical Center in Fort Worth but were not seriously injured. Ashlyn Danielle Evans, 18, of Burleson, the driver of the Volkswagen, and her passenger, 15-year-old Peyton Alan of Burleson, were not injured.
Anderson said that Couch's truck, after hitting Jennings' truck, "went airborne" before flipping upside down and hitting a tree on the shoulder of the westbound lane.
Anderson said the Ford truck was mangled "almost beyond being recognizable as a vehicle."
The accident report Anderson released indicates that Couch and 19-year-old Rich Cornell Avery were in the front seat of Couch's truck, and that Garrett Lee Ballard, 16, Starr Teague, 15, Jacob Adam Goodsell, 15, and Christian Victoria, 15, were all in the back seat of the truck's cab.
Solomon Mohmand and Sergio Molina, both 15, were in the bed of the truck and thrown out when the accident occurred. Anderson said one of the two riding in the cab is the one who remains hospitalized with serious injuries.
Anderson called the scene of the accident one of the most horrific he has seen during his career and that "the only real surprise" in the investigation was that there weren't more fatalities.
"This was a tragedy that was completely preventable," Anderson said. "Because this group of people in that pickup truck made some very, very bad decisions, four totally innocent people lost their lives."
- See more at:
http://www.cleburnetimesrev...XN6N2.dpuf
Tarrant crash victim: 'Momma, I love you. Please hurry!'
http://www.wfaa.com/news/lo...25261.html
Alcohol Was Factor In Fatal Crash Near Burleson
http://dfw.cbslocal.com/201...tal-crash/
Tarrant County Sheriff's Department Releases New Info in Crash That Killed 4 Pedestrians
http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/...74561.html
911 callers describe deadly crash in southern Tarrant
Read more here:
http://www.star-telegram.co...rylink=cpy
http://www.star-telegram.co...eadly.html
