A Mississippi woman could spend the next decade and a half behind bars for a March 2014 drunk driving crash that killed one man and seriously injured another. Not only was she intoxicated at the time of the collision, but she was also texting and speeding, according to investigators.
She was sentenced earlier this month to a 15-month prison term for the crash that occurred as she was driving her Ford F-150 from Jackson toward Raymond on Highway 18 in the early morning hours after leaving a bar. According to her mother, she was headed home.
Authorities say the woman was traveling at 20 miles over the speed limit. They reported her blood alcohol level at 0.13 when she was arrested and charged with aggravated drunk driving. The woman, who was 33 years old at the time, was not injured in the crash.
The two men who were in the back seat of the Toyota 4Runner she rear-ended were thrown from the vehicle. The man who died was 21. According to his sister, he ended up 40 feet away from the vehicle. The other man, who was 22 years old, required multiple surgeries over a period of months for his injuries. The other two people in the vehicle were uninjured. It wasn’t reported whether the men were thrown from the 4Runner.
While victims and surviving family members feel some sense of relief in seeing a drunk and/or negligent driver criminally punished for his or her actions, civil litigation is often necessary to try to secure some compensation to help ease the financial burden of medical care, burial costs and lost wages. Mississippi personal injury attorneys can offer guidance to those seeking such action.
Source: WAPT News, “Woman sentenced to prison for fatal drunken driving crash,” Angela Williams, Sep. 08, 2016