Teen receives four months in jail for deadly crash

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This article was published 07/02/2012 (5104 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A young man has been sentenced to four months in jail for a booze cruise crash that killed his 15-year-old friend, Stefan Potter.

Potter’s family says they hope the sentence sends a message to drunk drivers, but no punishment — not even the jail sentence the driver received — will help them cope with their loss.

“They’ll have their son in the end,” Potter’s mom Colleen Henderson said of the offender’s parents. “I don’t have that.”

The offender can’t be named because he was 17 years old at the time of the crash. He was sentenced Monday after previously pleading guilty to criminal negligence causing death and criminal negligence causing bodily harm.

Potter, who was from Crystal City, was killed in a Nov. 6, 2010 rollover along a gravel road in the RM of Argyle. He was one of five youths in the car, a group of teens that had attended Pilot Mound Collegiate together.

During Monday’s sentencing, Judge Shauna Hewitt-Michta described the events that led up to the crash.

Even though they were underage, the youths spent time in a La Riviere bar before they loaded beer, which was bought by the driver, into a car and headed out on rural roads. Most, if not all, of them were drinking.

There was an early sign of trouble when the driver narrowly missed a hydro pole.

Just before the crash, the driver asked if anyone wanted to drive and a 14-year-old girl volunteered and took a seat in the driver’s lap.

As the vehicle swerved, someone yelled, “The road!” and the boy in the driver’s seat yanked on the wheel.

The car rolled and Potter, who was a passenger in the vehicle, and the girl who had been sitting in the driver’s lap were both thrown from the vehicle.

Potter died at the scene and the girl had injuries that included a fractured neck, a broken collar bone and a broken leg.

The accused suffered some injuries too, as he spent four days in hospital and three weeks under bed rest. Court has heard two other teenage boys suffered relatively minor injuries.

Hewitt-Michta described the offender’s actions as thrill-seeking and noted it’s the sort of thing he’d done before.

He was known to let girls ride in his lap, and he admitted that he and his friends would go booze cruising almost monthly.

His licence had expired three days before the fatal crash. Even if it had been active, it would have restricted him to a blood-alcohol content of zero while driving.

It’s estimated that his blood-alcohol level was anywhere from just below to well above the legal limit at the time of crash.

During sentencing, Hewitt-Michta rejected defence lawyer Hymie Weinstein’s request for probation for his client. She also didn’t opt for the eight months custody proposed by Crown attorney Grant Hughes.

Instead, the judge settled on a sentence of four months in jail followed by two months supervision in the community. That, in turn, will be followed by one year of probation.

The probation includes 40 hours of community service in which the offender must work to prevent drinking and driving or reckless driving. That can include such things as working with groups like Teens Against Drunk Driving or public speaking.

Following court, Henderson said she and her family need time to reflect on the sentence, but they offered the following as part of a written statement:

“Our hope is that in some way a message is sent to those people that continue to choose to drink and drive, that the risk simply isn’t worth it. Families are devastated; lives are forever changed.”

» ihitchen@brandonsun.com