Driver testifies he took hands off wheel and fainted before crash

The stolen 2016 Ford Mustang was zooming at 117 mph along a Boca Raton road late at night when, 15-year-old Wesley Brown recalls, he got scared and took his eyes off the road and his hands off the steering wheel.

“My mind is racing,” Brown, now 16, told a Palm Beach County jury Wednesday, recalling how he was fleeing the police on the orders of his older passenger. “I started to lose my breath.”

The Deerfield Beach teenager, testifying during the second day of his trial on vehicular homicide and other charges, explained he felt an asthma attack coming on and had started to look for his inhaler when he lost consciousness.

“I blacked out,” said Brown, later explaining he had tried to apply the brakes but never saw the red light at the Northwest Second Avenue and Palmetto Park Road intersection. Within seconds — at 11:22 p.m. Nov. 1, 2015 — the Mustang slammed into a 2012 Honda Pilot driven by Wendy Harris-Aceves, 46. The mother of two from Boca Raton was ejected from the SUV and died instantly, according to court testimony.

Prosecutors say the victim’s death was a result of Brown’s “recklessness, and his total disregard for anyone’s safety” — and the fact that he was an inexperienced driver without so much as a learner’s permit, let alone a license. He was charged as an adult.

Brown, then in eighth grade, said he first found out about the loss of life when a police officer at the scene told him, “Good job, buddy, you killed someone.”

But the gravity of the situation, and the reality of the tragic night, didn’t become clear until he heard a television news report about the crash while in a hospital bed with a broken femur and wrist.

“I started crying,” Brown told Public Defender Carey Haughwout.

The lawyer says her client is guilty of driving without a license, but should be acquitted of the most serious charges because of the circumstances leading up to the crash.

Brown testified he made the poor decision to seek a ride in the fancy convertible he saw coasting through his neighborhood. He re-