Santa Fe man gets 6 years for causing fatal crash
Griego, who had sedative in his system, pleaded guilty in death of Pojoaque woman
A judge on Monday sentenced a Santa Fe man with a history of drunken driving to six years in prison for causing a motor vehicle crash that killed a 40-year-old Pojoaque woman while he was under the influence of a sedative used to treat insomnia.
Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer also ruled that Jimmy Griego’s actions on a November morning in 2014, speeding and weaving through traffic on U.S. 84/285 before he caused Celeste Maestas to smash her car head-on into a concrete barrier, constituted a “serious violent offense.”
That means he must complete at least 85 percent of the sentence and is not eligible to earn day-for-day good time credit. He will receive just under two years credit for time he served in jail and on electronic monitoring while awaiting trial.
According to evidence and testimony presented Monday, after causing the crash Griego stopped at the Buffalo
Thunder Resort & Casino where he played slot machines for nearly a half-hour before police found him and placed him under arrest.
Maestas, the mother of two children, was described by her older sister Monday as a Godfearing woman who was beautiful on both the outside and the inside.
Griego, who last fall pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in the case, apologized to members of her family at Monday’s hearing, saying, “There are no words to describe how I feel. You don’t know what it’s doing to me. It’s eating me up inside as well.”
Griego, who had at least two DWI convictions on his record more than 10 years earlier, on the morning of the crash was under the influence of zolpidem, a generic version of the drug Ambien, which has been known to cause people to drive while asleep.
Griego’s wife, Maria Benavidez, said Monday that on that morning she had left her husband asleep in their truck outside her place of employment and returned to find he and the truck were gone.
Prosecutor Jason Lidyard outlined the chain of events leading up to the crash using images of the highway and recorded interviews with witness to illustrate how Griego drove north out of Santa Fe at a high rate of speed, weaving in and out of traffic and having several other near misses before causing the fatal accident.
As he descended the hill by the Santa Fe Opera, Lidyard said, Griego sideswiped a vehicle that was towing a trailer, prompting that vehicle’s driver to call 911 to report his erratic driving.
Witnesses said Griego was swerving between the median and the passing lane and back again, tailgating and narrowly missing other vehicles at a rate of speed which caused him to suddenly overtake and startle other drivers on the road.
When he came upon Maestas’ vehicle, witnesses said, she was so surprised she jerked her car to the right in an effort to avoid him, directing her car toward a concrete barrier on the side of the road, then over-corrected and lurched across the median and into the southbound lanes where she collided with another motorist before crashing headon into the concrete barrier on the other side of the highway.
Her seatbelt may have malfunctioned, according to Lidyard, and she died of blunt force trauma after smashing headfirst into her windshield.
Immediately following the crash, Griego exited the freeway at Buffalo Thunder, witnesses said, parked his truck in a dirt lot, and after inspecting it, went inside and played slots for 26 minutes. He then redeemed his credits with a cashier before leaving the casino and being arrested.
He told police a story about having to drop his truck off for someone else to pick up at the casino, and claimed to have no knowledge of any accident.
Police originally thought he may have been driving drunk, but a toxicology report showed only the sedative in his system.
The medication is dispensed with literature, numerous copies of which were found in his car, that warns of the possibility of unconscious driving.
Griego told police he had taken the medicine at midnight, but when a toxicology report on blood drawn an hour or so after the 10 a.m. crash, about 13 hours after he said he had taken the medication, showed the level of the drug in his system was about twice what it should have been at peak saturation, which should have occurred about two hours after ingestion.
Lidyard disputed Griego’s claim that he didn’t remember the accident, saying his postcrash behavior indicated knowledge of what had happened.
But, Lidyard said, even if Griego didn’t remember “it was still his actions in abusing his medication in the first place that got him into this situation. And that is his responsibility.”