Posted on 10/03/2006 2:25:18 PM PDT by kiriath_jearim
Jurors in a packed courtroom this afternoon saw a video of the last seconds before the limousine carrying a family from a Bayville wedding was hit head-on by a pickup going the wrong way on the Meadowbrook Parkway in 2005.
Headlights quickly approached the limo before a screeching sound and the end of the short video. "Those five seconds set the agenda for me and my wife for the rest of my life," said Neil Flynn, who was in the limo when his daughter Katie, 7, was killed. The driver, Stanley Rabinowitz, also was killed.
Meanwhile, a toxicologist testified earlier today that if Martin Heidgen had as many as 14 drinks in his system on the night he crashed his pickup truck into a limosuine on the Meadowbrook Parkway, then his reaction time may have been slower than usual.
But it should not have slowed his reaction down by more than two minutes -- the amount of time prosecutors say Heidgen was driving the wrong way on the parkway before he hit a limosuine early July 2, 2005, killing two people, the toxicologist said.
William Closson, who testified in Mineola for the prosecution in Heidgen's murder trial, testified about how Heidgen's .28 percent blood alcohol level might affect a person -- by making their thoughts fuzzy, and delaying the time it took information to get to a person's brain.
But defense lawyer Stephen LaMagna of Garden City questioned Closson about the possibility that Heidgen could have been confused. If that were the case, LaMagna asked if it could have delayed the time it took Heidgen to figure out what was going on.
Closson said it could.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsday.com ...
What a tragedy. It's amazing how quickly your life can be taken away by the senseless, selfish acts of others.
I think my question would be, did the dope have enough sense to figure out he was drunk and what the h*** was he doing driving ANY vehicle?
This makes me wonder if the Heidgen character had any previous driving offenses!
Duh, ya think??
I say ram him into the flat side of a mountain at 120 miles an hour. That sounds fair to me.
There is a lot more to DUI than simply slowed reaction time!
I'm not a toxicologist but I've had some familiarity with these kinds of case.
14 drinks -- chances are he didn't know (or care) that he was on the wrong side of the road simply due to his level of intoxication.
You said -- "I say ram him into the flat side of a mountain at 120 miles an hour. That sounds fair to me."
He's dead already..., what more do you propose to do to him, other than that?
Regards,
Star Traveler
It was the limo driver that died. I thought it meant the other driver too when I scanned it.
I was a police officer for 30 years and I have arrested hundreds if not thousands of drunk drivers. I have only seen one person that was as drunk as this guy was. I can remember him so well because he couldn't even tell us his name. When we helped him out of the car he couldn't stand up and he had no idea where he was. He checked out .28 and I still to this day cannot understand how he was even driving as well as he was. The judge fined him $111.00 and didn't even revoke his license. A couple of months later we caught him again but this time he wasn't nearly so drunk. I have heard of people who were .32 but I have never seen anyone that bad. I have also heard that most people die when they reach the .30 mark but I don't know if that's true or not.I kinda doubt that myself.
You said -- "The drunk is still alive..."
I saw the article said the driver was killed. What driver were they talking about? Were there two drivers in the drunk's car fighting over the wheel (and one survived)?
Regards,
Star Traveler
You said -- "It was the limo driver that died. I thought it meant the other driver too when I scanned it."
Ahhh..., I see...
I guess I must have been reading the article upside-down... :-)
Regards,
Star Traveler
Precisely!
If the prosecution allows the defense to limit the issues of the case to slower reaction time, then they are assured a tragic loss.
And here I was thinking that someone finally indicted Hillary's driver for running down a security guard at the airport.
I was an officer in a town that borders an Indian reservation. We had a "town drunk" who had been tested at over 0.30--can't remember the exact number--and was still able to walk reasonably well. I think it's a matter of a lifetime of alcohol tolerance.
The limo driver died, the drunk driver lived...should have been the other way around.
We used to have some like that who drank everyday and we called them professional drunks. They could handle it a lot better than most people could. I have caught some people that I really wasn't sure about because they weren't driving too bad but when we tested them they would check out .18 or so. Those were professional drunks I guess. I still really hate drunk drivers and while I was a policeman I had no mercy on their a*s if I caught them and I was never swayed by their sob stories either. The judge might cut them a deal on the fine but they would spend the night in jail anyway.
This toxicologist is a friggin genius, I think.
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