Woman gets 10 years for killing man, 79, with car

A Little Rock woman was sentenced to 10 years in prison Friday for fatally injuring an elderly pedestrian in an impaired-driving crash in which Julia Blackwell veered off a west Little Rock street, traveled along several hundred feet of sidewalk and struck the man.

A Pulaski County jury also fined Blackwell $500 for kicking a police officer who was attempting to arrest her after the crash in the 2100 block of Breckenridge Drive. Police said a kicking and screaming Blackwell partially pulled off her handcuffs during the encounter and had to be pepper-sprayed four times before officers could get her under control.

A urine test showed methamphetamines along with prescription stimulants, painkillers, stimulants and antidepressants in her system. Blackwell, 32, admitted having only an Adderall prescription, which accounted for the stimulant amphetamine, discovered by the state Crime Laboratory. Prosecutors showed she had access to her terminally ill grandmother’s prescription painkillers.

The eight women and four men deliberated about an hour to convict Blackwell of felony negligent homicide for the death of Ralph Friedmann Jr., a 79-year-old home health-care business owner and philanthropist, and misdemeanor battery for minor injuries to Ashley Sharpmark, the first officer to arrive at the March 2010 crash. Blackwell faced a maximum of 20 years and can qualify for parole after serving 20 months.

With no evidence that Blackwell braked before or after hitting Friedmann, deputy prosecutor Hugh Finkelstein told jurors there was only one reason she ran off the road and onto the sidewalk.

“The reason is she was out of it. She was not in her right mind,” he said in his closing argument. “She ran that poor man over.”

Blackwell drove onto the sidewalk and past seven homes before clipping a tree. She then veered left back across the street and traveled into the yard of another home, according to testimony.

Ralph Breshears, a police vehicular-homicide investigator, estimated that Blackwell was traveling at least 45 mph, at least 10 miles over the speed limit, based on where Friedmann struck her windshield. The man’s body hit near the car roof, he testified, explaining that the height of the impact helps indicate the speed of the vehicle.

Friedmann’s shoes flew off on impact, which is another indicator of how fast she was going, he said.

“If this shoe was in this tree … it would indicate there was a whole lot of energy,” Breshears told jurors. “This subject was hit with a lot of force because this shoe was still tied. It literally knocked him out of his shoes.”

Defense attorney Debra Reece disputed there was any proof Friedmann’s death was anything other than an accident. She said a blown tire, an animal running into the roadway or another vehicle moving into Blackwell’s lane of traffic could have caused her client to veer off the road.

“There are things called accidents for a reason,” she said. “It’s horrible but that doesn’t make her reckless.”

She told jurors there was no proof her client did anything wrong, calling the police investigation “garbage” and “sloppy.”

Jurors would be wrong to rely on the urine test because police had mishandled it, she said.

“The evidence has come up short,” Reece said. “What they probably did was mix up the … samples. Without the urine test, they have no evidence of intoxication.”

Blackwell wasn’t being deliberately combative but was acting “completely reasonable” in struggling with police, Reece said. Police overreacted when they “manhandled” her client, who was reeling from the traumatizing experience of losing control of her borrowed gray Lexus and running into a man and then a tree, the defense attorney said.

“She was acting just like somebody involved in an acbecause cident would be,” Reece said. “She reacted normally. The same way a lot of citizens would react if they hadn’t done anything wrong. Under the circumstances she was in, she reacted appropriately.”

Blackwell did not testify during the evidentiary portion of the trial, taking the stand only at sentencing where she offered a nominal apology to the Friedmann family. Blackwell said she also had suffered the loss of a father, who died 10 years ago, while her 90-year-old grandmother died three weeks after she hit Friedmann.

Her mother, Dana Blackwell, told jurors that she was acquainted with Friedmann they lived in the same condominiums and also offered an apology to the victim’s family.

Dana Blackwell said she felt some responsibility for his death because she had sent her daughter to buy lunch and the woman was returning home from that errand when she ran down Friedmann. She said her daughter showed no sign of impairment when Julia Blackwell left to pick up the food.