Teen’s secret tied to fatal crash

Article subtitle: 
Panic over his undocumented status led a Churchill High student to flee police, his lawyer says at sentencing
Article author: 
Karen McCowan
Article publisher: 
registerguard.com
Article date: 
Friday, September 28, 2012
Article category: 
Crime
Medium
Article Body: 

Lack of immigration papers prompted a Churchill High School student to flee a traffic stop on March 7, causing an accident that killed two people, his attorney said on Thursday.

Emanuel Herrera-­Gutierrez, 16, was sentenced to 75 months in prison after pleading guilty to second-degree manslaughter for recklessly causing the deaths of Toni Lynn Bryson and Richard Lee Taylor. Defense attorney John Kolego said his client was not a legal resident of the United States, despite living here nearly all his life.

“He knew this dark secret that he had, that he was undocumented, even though he’d been here since he was 2,” Kolego said in an interview after the sentencing. “And when he was pulled over by the police officer, the fact that he was undocumented, the fact that he could potentially cause problems for his whole family, just led to pure panic. ... He just panicked and took off. Unfortunately that led to the deaths of two people and to two police officers being injured.”

Herrera-Gutierrez was driving his parents’ 2000 Nissan Maxima 90 miles per hour when he ran a red light at West 11th Avenue and Bertlesen Road and slammed into a vehicle driven by Taylor, prosecutor Dave Hopkins said at the sentencing. Taylor, 62, and his passenger Bryson, 43, were both ejected and died of their injuries at a hospital.

The Nissan then careened into a Eugene police patrol car that happened to be sitting at the red light, Hopkins said, injuring officers Kyle Evans and Joshua Sundquist. The impact caused the Nissan’s engine to catch fire, and both jumped out to render aid, the Lane County deputy district attorney said.

“Officer Sundquist, with one (injured) arm dangling, gets a fire extinguisher to put out the fire,” Hopkins said.

Herrera-Gutierrez was initially unresponsive when Evans tried to check on him, but when the teen came to, he tried to start the car again instead of trying to get out of it, the prosecutor said.

Herrera-Gutierrez probably will face deportation after completing his sentence, Kolego said.
It’s not clear what country the teen was born in. Nearly a dozen people who appeared to be his family members attended the sentencing, but did not respond to a reporter’s interview request. Several of them wept quietly throughout the proceeding.

No relatives of Taylor or Bryson were in the courtroom, though one of Bryson’s sisters made a statement by telephone from her home on the Oregon Coast.

“We loved our sister, and she had four children and they lost their mom,” Dory Thurman told Lane County Circuit Judge Karsten Rasmussen. “We will have to live with this for the rest of our lives. I’m sorry that everybody has to suffer for the choices (Herrera-Gutierrez) made that night.”

Kolego said the teen’s undocumented status also helped set those events in motion. Because of it, he was unable to get a driver’s permit and license, as most of his peers were doing. Wanting to drive, he waited until his parents were asleep that night and took their car out without permission.

He made another in a “series of catastrophic choices” when he decided to speed on the Randy Papé Beltline, Hopkins said. An Oregon State Police trooper saw Herrera-Gutierrez driving “about 100 miles an hour” and began pursuing him shortly before the 12:33 a.m. crash, the prosecutor said.

The teen initially pulled over just past the Barger Drive overpass, Hopkins said. But as soon as the trooper got out of his vehicle, Herrera-Gutierrez took off southbound toward West 11th Avenue, where he turned east and accelerated toward the site of the impending crash.

Hopkins told Rasmussen that the teen never asked about the condition of Bryson and Taylor, despite seeing them receiving medical attention at the crash scene and later being taken to the same emergency room as Taylor.

Under Oregon’s Ballot Measure 11, he was charged as an adult and will serve the mandatory minimum sentence of 75 months for second-degree manslaughter. He will do so in the custody of the Oregon Department of Corrections rather than the Oregon Youth Authority, despite his young age, his lack of criminal record and the fact that drugs and alcohol were not involved in the crash.

Kolego told the judge that his client was not indifferent to the harm he’d caused, but was dazed after suffering a concussion.

After the hearing, the defense attorney expressed hope that Herrera-Gutierrez would be incarcerated at the state’s MacLaren Youth Correctional Facility in Woodburn until age 18, and “hopefully, if he continues to behave himself, will remain isolated from hardened prisoners” after that. Kolego said Lane County juvenile detention officials have said they’ve never had a young inmate as well-behaved as his client.

“This is a really decent kid who made a horrific decision when he was too young to fully appreciate the risk he was putting other people in,” the defense attorney said.