Jurors to begin deliberating in Brewer trial
Now that they’ve heard all the testimony, jurors must decide today which narrative to believe in the trial of a commercial truck driver accused of killing six in an interstate wreck in 2015.
Did Benjamin Scott Brewer slam into slowed traffic on Interstate 75 on June 25, 2015, never once tapping the brakes, because he ingested methamphetamine? Or are prosecutors using faulty blood tests and overlooking unhelpful facts to score an emotional conviction, as Brewer’s defenders claim?
Brewer, 42, has stood trial in Hamilton County Criminal Court since Monday, but a combination of crash reconstruction evidence, toxicology reports and eyewitness testimony has stripped the trucker of his cloak of innocence, Assistant District Attorney Crystle Carrion said Wednesday during closing arguments.
“Nothing was going wrong [with his truck],” Carrion said. “Plus, what do you know about his brakes? That if a truck’s brake system is malfunctioning, it’s going to lock up. And if it locks up, it starts skidding. If the brakes malfunctioned, there would have been tire marks.”
But there weren’t skidmarks, Carrion said. Nor was there evidence that Brewer dozed off behind the wheel, like his defenders argued.
“Maybe he was sleeping,” Carrion said. “But guess who told you he wasn’t? Brewer wrote, ‘I seen brakes lights and tried to stop.’ He didn’t say, ‘I fell asleep and woke up at the end of a crash.’ Sleeping people don’t see brake lights.”
To Carrion and District Attorney General Neal Pinkston, that left one other option for the 453 feet of carnage, smoke and twisted metal that Brewer caused: a Tennessee Bureau of Investigation report that showed he had methamphetamine and amphetamine in his system.
Public defenders have railed against those test results for months, claiming prosecutors couldn’t prove intoxication at the time of the crash, a necessary component of the six vehicular homicide charges Brewer faces. Brewer is also charged with four counts of reckless aggravated assault and individual counts of driving under the influence and speeding.
But Wednesday, they raised the stakes, saying a state toxicologist contaminated Brewer’s blood test but never told anyone until defenders pried the truth from her on the witness stand.
After prosecutors rested their case Wednesday morning, defenders also called their own expert, Robert Belloto, a chemist and statistician from Ohio, who said the state’s blood test didn’t differentiate between an over-thecounter product containing methamphetamine or the illicit substance. So how could jurors know for themselves whether Brewer was impaired?
“What you have just seen,” defense attorney Jay Underwood told jurors, “is the government cherrypicking evidence that fits their narrative that Benjamin Brewer was hyped up on methamphetamine.”
Underwood told jurors his client was never intoxicated and shared facts he believed prosecutors had glossed over.
First, a state witness said he followed Brewer on the highway, concerned by the trucker’s tailgating, speeding and other reckless driving. But how could he follow a speeding Brewer and later pass him, according to his own testimony, Underwood asked. The story was inconsistent.
Next, at the scene of the crash, Brewer first spoke to Gray Gibson, a trooper with the Tennessee Highway Patrol, who never noted Brewer was intoxicated, Underwood said. Then, Brewer coherently answered questions about his commercial driver’s license from a Chattanooga
traffic officer. Finally, he sat in a patrol car for several hours, “scrutinized by more officers that night than we ever will be in our lives,” Underwood said.
Pinkston, the district attorney, said officers must have suspected something was wrong, otherwise they wouldn’t have sent Brewer to Brian Hickman, chief of the Collegedale Police Department, to have a drug recognition exam done.
Underwood, however, called that exam “junk science” and said Hickman was looking for any excuse to make Brewer fail. Plus, he got a few things wrong, Underwood said.
The 12-step program, developed in the 1970s and ’80s by the Los Angeles Police Department and Johns Hopkins University, measures heart rate, blood pressure and pupil dilation and sends people suspected of impairment through a series of field-sobriety tests.
Hickman suspected Brewer had ingested a stimulant, but Underwood said his client wasn’t exhibiting any of those symptoms: He wasn’t suffering from lack of appetite, insomnia, high body temperature, or weird muscle tone. They let Brewer leave that night, and he was never charged until the contaminated TBI test came back and confirmed everyone’s bias, Underwood said.
Pinkston, in his final approach to jurors, said nobody contaminated a test and nobody was trying to hide anything. “I mean, how do you think they got the [TBI] papers they showed you?” he asked.
Pinkston had his own questions for jurors to consider: If Brewer had dozed off, how could he be speeding down the road for multiple miles? And if every other car could remember to slow down because of the ‘construction ahead’ signs, why couldn’t Brewer?
“They all remember,” he said, “because they were safely operating a motor vehicle.”
Jury deliberations begin today at 9 a.m.