Thread: SC-Illegal Gets 8-Years For Double Fatal York Co. Crash

Illegal Immigrant Gets 8-Year Sentence For Double Fatal York Co. Crash
Greg Suskin.

Posted: 5:57 pm EDT September 2, 2009
Updated: 6:38 pm EDT September 2, 2009

YORK COUNTY, S.C. -- A deadly York County accident landed an illegal immigrant in prison for eight years.

Witnesses said 29-year-old Maria Garcia Sanchez never hit the brakes and never swerved when she drove across four lanes of traffic and slammed head-on into a pickup truck last spring. In that truck was a Charlotte couple, 58-year-old Dan McKenzie, and his wife, 64-year-old Maureen.

"It was like murder. I think my sister was murdered. This was no accident," said a sister of Maureen McKenzie on Wednesday in a York County courtroom.

Sanchez was before a judge to plead guilty to two counts of reckless homicide in the deaths, but family members of the victims are outraged that she was driving at all.

Sanchez had been convicted three times for driving without a license and once for driving without insurance. Prosecutors said Sanchez never had a license at all or any training on how to drive a car.

"She was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off," said Deputy Solicitor Willy Thompson. "She said she was driving that day because she didn't have a ride to work, but the investigation showed that wasn't the case. She often drove."

The McKenzies were originally from Hartford, Conn., and moved to Charlotte for a job in 2001. On Wednesday, a dozen family members and a neighbor showed up in court to stand up for them and see justice served. For their daughter, Tracy Pentalow, her parents' deaths are even more unfathomable because the woman responsible shouldn't have been on the road at all.

"It's horrifying that they can get away with it, and keep walking away when something like this happens, until two lives are lost," Pentalow said.

In court, Thompson said Sanchez was a woman who simply didn't care about the law and had a clear history of reckless driving.

Sanchez apologized to the McKenzie family through an interpreter because she speaks no English. However, according to her attorney, she does not believe she acted recklessly.

Following the crash, Sanchez told state troopers she had swerved out of her lane to avoid a pool of standing water because it had been raining. However, troopers investigating never found any water, and in fact, pointed out that that stretch of Highway 161 is new and has good drainage that would not have created a water hazard.

Sanchez took an Alford plea, which under the law allows a person to plead guilty to a charge without admitting guilt. The defendant acknowledges instead that prosecutors could successfully prove his or her guilt to a jury.

Sanchez will be deported after her jail term is over. If she ever re-enters the United States, prosecutors said it would be considered a federal offense and she could serve another 10 years in prison. Her attorney said the rest of her family has already moved back to Mexico.

For heartbroken members of the McKenzie family, there's nothing to ease their pain. They just hope a tragic case like theirs might make a difference before other lives are lost.

"Our family circle has been broken, and my parents died horribly and needlessly," Pentalow said.


http://www.wsoctv.com/news/20693133/detail.html

Apparently, a lying, cheating IA who definitely needs amnesty, so she can get some driving lessons (in Spanish, of course.)