The Rest of the Story

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  • XD-GEM

    XD-GEM
    Premium Member
    Rating - 100%
    7   0   0
    Jun 8, 2008
    2,529
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    New Orleans
    Thanks to those who gave me good info on the parole question I asked earlier.

    As promised, here's the rest of the story. (For the TLDR crowd, it's a hell of a story worth the effort.)

    About a year and a half ago, I was involved in a fatal wreck, discussed in this thread:
    https://www.bayoushooter.com/forums/showthread.php?148486-PSA-Wear-Your-Seatbelts!&highlight=

    Short version: guy blows through stop sign right in front of me; woman is ejected from his car and dies.

    The rest of this story couldn't have been made up by any Hollywood writer.

    At the scene, I got out of my car to check on the ejected woman. The driver of the other car came up to me, quite distressed and said, "Please help her. That's my wife."

    Then he ran off. Being the charitable sort, I figured that maybe he lived in the neighborhood and was going to get some tools to get the car off of the woman. Actually, he was a parolee who likely did not want to talk to the cops. They found him anyway and took him in for a mandatory blood draw.

    The lab work, however was sent out of town because the Orleans Parish Coroner's Office was in the process of moving to its new digs. The results came back about three months later. His BAC was .04, but he tested positive for cocaine, and they promptly revoked his parole and put him in jail on a Vehicular Homicide charge.

    Now this man was never supposed to have been on parole in the first place. He was originally sent to prison in the 1980's on an armed robbery charge that was sufficiently brutal enough to earn him a 50 year sentence without the possibility of probation or parole. He lost two appeals, and so he sat in prison for a long time.

    Flash forward a few decades. Louisiana prisons are deemed overcrowded and are ordered to have a population reduction. They ran out of non-violent first offenders fairly quickly and began to look elsewhere. They looked for old guys who had mostly behaved themselves in prison, and this guy qualified. It was a gift sent from heaven for him - a second chance that he never expected to get.

    He seems to have stayed relatively clean; I found an arrest for drunk and disorderly in St. Bernard Parish, but that was all I could find in public records.

    Shortly before he was put in jail following the wreck, I got a letter from one of the bottom-feeding sort of attorneys who said he was retained to seek damages from me for the death of this guy's wife - in the wreck that he was clearly at fault in. Then he was put in jail and went to criminal court. He claimed to be unable to afford a lawyer, so the judge assigned a public one; but the public attorney refused the case, citing budgetary constraints.

    This guy then became the lead plaintiff in the A C L U case against the state of Louisiana. All of a sudden, the civil threat against me went away. My guess is that any award from me to him would have rendered him incapable of being the lead plaintiff in the other case. Thankfully, the prescription period expired, and I no longer could be sued for this.

    Then the state properly funded the public lawyers' office, and the suit got dropped. So this guy gets nothing from the state, and nothing from me (although I think he still faults me for the wreck). He then sits in jail for over two years awaiting the Vehicular Homicide charge.

    Then a funny thing happened. From what the DA told me, the public lawyer made an argument that testing positive for cocaine did not prove incapacitation for driving. The state couldn't find anyone to testify otherwise; so, as I understand it, they let him plead to first offense DWI. He got 6 months, time served, and was released.

    Because this is a misdemeanor, his parole was no longer revoked, and he is out on the street. As far as I know, he still holds me responsible for the wreck that killed his wife; and he may also have hard feelings because while he sat in jail awaiting trial, both his Dad and his brother died.

    He knows where I work and where I live, because that information was all on the accident report. NOPD will be asked to make a few extra passes by my house when they can, and we'll post his photo at work for our security people to see. However, even Security is unarmed at work due to corporate "no guns" policy.

    So for awhile, I'll be living in a heightened state of awareness, and quite thankful that I already have my CHP.
     

    AustinBR

    Make your own luck
    Staff member
    Admin
    Rating - 100%
    15   0   0
    Oct 22, 2012
    10,792
    113
    You should make sure your house is more difficult than the average house to get into. Cameras and a big dog probably wouldn't hurt either.
     

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