Fatal hit-and-run driver gets 5 years

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Man was unlicensed, illegal immigrant Thursday, May 3, 2007
By ERIC HARTLEY, Staff Writer
An unlicensed driver who hit and killed a Millersville woman as she walked across Ritchie Highway, then got out of his wrecked car and walked away, was sentenced yesterday to five years in prison.
Jose Santos Toledo, 19, got the maximum penalty after pleading guilty to failing to stop at the scene of a fatal accident. He was not drinking before the crash.

"I cannot come up with any justification not to impose the maximum for this offense," District Court Judge Megan B. Johnson said.

Mr. Toledo, an illegal immigrant from Mexico, will probably be deported after he's released. He can appeal his case to Circuit Court, where he has the automatic right to a new trial.

The five-year sentence is far above the norm for fatal crashes in the county. Even people who kill someone while drunk or on drugs and are convicted of the more serious charge of manslaughter generally get only between 18 months and three years in prison.

Longer sentences are imposed in some extraordinary cases. For example, Linda Nichols, a woman who was drunk when she rear-ended a car in Severna Park and killed two teenagers in 2005, was sentenced to five years - the same as Mr. Toledo.

Mary Lou Shiflett, 46, was killed Feb. 16 as she was crossing Ritchie Highway at the intersection of Jumpers Hole Road in Pasadena. Her family said she was walking home from a McDonald's after having an argument with her husband.

An accident investigator estimated that Mr. Toledo was going 52 to 56 mph in a 45 mph speed zone. The force of the impact was so great that Mrs.

Shiflett went through the windshield of the 1996 Saturn sedan and bent the top of the steering wheel before flying off into the road.

A county police investigation found that Mrs. Shiflett was at fault, a conclusion that angered her family.

"The police told me, 'Look, your wife stepped in front of a car. She killed herself,' " said Matthew Shiflett, her husband of almost 27 years. "Nobody cared. They all just didn't care."

The family said police didn't give enough credence to the account of a witness who said Mr. Toledo ran a red light. In an interview, Tehalia Armiger of Glen Burnie said she was on Jumpers Hole Road waiting to cross and her light had already turned green when Mr. Toledo hit Mrs. Shiflett.

"Our light turned green, he hit her, she flew," Ms. Armiger said.

Police said Mrs. Shiflett flew more than 100 feet before landing in the road. Her leg was severed.

Mr. Toledo continued on for about 200 yards, but the car wasn't drivable, so he stopped it and walked away. Police found him walking in the median about a mile away.

In a report, Cpl. C. Gregory Russell wrote: "There is no evidence that anything other than pedestrian error caused this collision."

According to the report, Mr. Shiflett told police his wife had a long-term drug and alcohol problem and had just flown home that night after spending a week with her mother in Florida. She appeared to be under the influence of something and he left her at a McDonald's on the corner of Baltimore Annapolis Boulevard and Mountain Road and went home.

But even if his wife was under the influence, Mr. Shiflett said, Mr. Toledo was responsible because he shouldn't have been in this country and shouldn't have been on the road.

Mr. Toledo has been in the United States about two years and was working at a McDonald's for four or five months before his arrest, his lawyer said.

Turning toward the Shiflett family in court yesterday, Mr. Toledo, dressed in a green jail uniform and surrounded by three guards, said through an interpreter: "I'm very sad for what happened."

Shortly after the crash, Mr. Toledo, who had only minor scrapes on his arm and face, told police he had a green light when he hit what he thought was an animal. He said he didn't know what to do, so he got out and started walking.

A Millersville native, Mrs. Shiflett met her future husband when she was 13 and he was 14, Mr. Shiflett said. They had three children and four granddaughters, and their first grandson, Isaac, is due in July.

Not long before she was killed, Mrs. Shiflett had started playing the piano, and one of the first songs she learned was the nursery rhyme that goes: "Hush little baby, don't say a word ..." She planned to sing it for Isaac.

Mr. Shiflett said he and his wife - many knew them as Luke and Penny - did everything together. Their parents had lived to an old age, so they expected perhaps another 25 or 30 years together.

"I'm going to be totally lost," Mr. Shiflett said, choking back tears.

Their daughter, Pamela Shiflett, said she has struggled to avoid reminders of her mother's death. Every time she drove away from visiting her father, she'd see the orange paint the police had put in the intersection to mark where her mother's clothing and parts of her body had landed.

Eventually, she said, the paint faded. The pain did not.

"There were mornings when I shed my first tear before I took my first breath," she said.

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