Driver guilty in fatal Oxford crash

WEST CHESTER » Did a southern Chester County woman lose her life in a motor vehicle crash because an Oxford man was — figuratively speaking — dying of thirst?

That was one of the scenarios advanced by the prosecution this past week during a nonjury trial in which the defendant, a janitor at Lincoln University at the time of the 2012 crash, faced charges of homicide by vehicle, involuntary manslaughter, and recklessly endangering another person.

On Friday, the Common Pleas judge presiding over the case, Phyllis Streitel, found Theodore Wissman, 49, guilty of all charges. She did not, however, explain what she based her findings on, except to state that she had “spent considerable time going over the evidence” in her deliberations.

“This is a tragic case,” she said. “This is a terrible case. On both sides, I must say I can’t imagine how difficult this case is for all of you.”

Her verdict, indeed, brought tears to the eyes of many in the audience — family members of both the victim and the defendant.

On July 5, 2012, Wissman’s Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck collided with a Nissan Sentra sedan driven by 20-year-old Kristy Jo Kelleher, a former Oxford Area High School student who was studying to be a nurse at the time of the crash. She was killed instantly in the collision, which took place about 2:45 p.m. at the intersection of West Locust Road and Risinghurst Lane on Oxford’s west side.

In his closing argument on Thursday, county District Attorney Chief of Staff Charles Gaza, who led the prosecution, asked Streitel to consider two possible scenarios in which she could find Wissman guilty of the charges against him.

First, that Wissman was exceeding the speed limit for no apparent reason and was therefore acting recklessly when he rounded a curve on West Locust Road in Oxford and plowed into the side of Kelleher’s car. An accident reconstruction expert called by Gaza, Tredyffrin Cpl. Kreg Isleib of the county’s Serious Crash Assistance Team, testified that he put Wissman’s speed at the time of impact at 77 miles per hour, more than two times the legal 35 mph speed.

But Gaza also pointed to medical disorders that Wissman suffered from, including epilepsy

On July 5, 2012, Wissman’s Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck collided with a Nissan Sentra sedan driven by 20-yearold Kristy Jo Kelleher. She was killed instantly in the collision.

and hyponatremia, a low sodium deficiency, that might have caused him to be so thirsty the day of the crash that he was in a rush to get home to quench that thirst. The county was in the middle of an 11-day-long heat wave, and temperatures the day of the crash reached 99 degrees in Oxford.

Despite working in an air conditioned building at the university, Wissman had grown almost uncontrollably thirsty. Some had said he remarked that he wanted to “drink a creek.”

“He had this thirst, and he wanted to get home,” Gaza said. “He wanted to get something to drink.” But instead of stopping and getting help for his condition, he drove faster.

“The answer isn’t to drive faster. It is to stop,” Gaza declared. “When you don’t, you are taking a risk. If you don’t feel well you shouldn’t be driving.”

But Wissman’s defense attorney, Francis C. Miller of West Chester, argued that evidence that he presented, both in his own case and through cross examination of prosecution witnesses, showed that Wissman had likely suffered a “medical event” in the seconds before the crash, causing him to lose consciousness.

Miller based his argument on the testimony of Dr. Daniel Howley of Philadelphia, who used the statement of a witness at the scene to determine that Wissman was shaking uncontrollably in the time af- ter the crash, the result of an epileptic seizure. Because he had no control over the pickup truck at the time, he should be found not guilty of the charges, Miller said, since he was acting neither willfully or recklessly.

All those in the case agreed that the crash was, in MiIler’s words, “an incredibly terrible thing.”

Wissman’s pickup was traveling southwest on West Locust when it collided with the side of Kelleher’s car. The truck flipped on its roof, and Wissman was trapped inside. He was airlifted from the scene to Christiana Hospital in Delaware, where he was hospitalized for about two weeks.

A witness who came upon the crash moments after it occurred testified that he first tried to check on the driver of the truck but could not initially see him through the windshield. As an Oxford Borough Public Works employee called police and directed traffic away from the scene, Robert Little told Streitel, he made his way to the sedan.

When Little looked inside, he said, he realized, unfortunately, that there was nothing that he could do for the driver, who was the sole occupant of the car. “You thought she was dead?” Gaza asked. “I knew it,” Little responded.

He said he then rechecked the pickup truck, which had flipped over. Peering inside the driver compartment from the for window, he could saw the driver, a man, who was breathing, and nodding his head up and down. He told him to hang on and that help was on the way.

Little said that he could not recall seeing anyone else approach the pickup before emergency personnel arrived, although on cross-examination he allowed that it could have happened and he did not remember. Another man, PECO line inspector Wordell Coleman, who had been working not far from the accident scene, also said he did not recall seeing anyone but Little approach the truck.

But Miller put on testimony from Jose Zavala, a young man who arrived at the scene with a friend in the moments after the crash. He told Streitel that he had seen Wissman shaking, the evidence used by Howley in his determination.

Ross Bowers, a West Chester University student who lives near the accident scene, said that he and Zavala, had arrived there shortly after the crash, on their way to Taco Bell. Although he said he was friends with Wissman’s daughter, at the time he did not know that her father was the driver of the pickup. He testified that he recalled seeing Zavala approach the pickup and squat down beside it. When Zavala later came back to where Bowers was standing, he seemed upset and said he had seen the man in the truck shaking.

In his closing, Gaza cast doubt on Zavala’s testimony, saying he was not in a position to have seen the inside of the truck’s cab, and that no one else who testified saw him approach the truck, although photos of the aftermath show Zavala at the scene.

“Mr. Zavala testified to events that did not occur,” Gaza said. “There is no way Mr. Zavala could have seen Mr. Wissman in that truck.”

Wissman did not take the stand in his own defense. “I have nothing I could add,” he told Streitel when she asked if he wanted to testify.

Wissman gave a videotaped statement to Chester County Detectives Martin Carbonell and Joseph Nangle, in which he described previous traffic accidents he’d been involved in, and the type of medication he took to control seizures and other medical conditions. He said that he did not remember details of the crash, although he did think initially that he had been hit by the car, and not the other way around.

“Maybe I passed out on the gas pedal,” he told the detectives.

After announcing her verdict, Streitel ordered Wissman to surrender his driver’s license pending sentencing and said he was not to operate a motor vehicle in the coming weeks. The judge indicated that Wissman would not be sentenced before the beginning of the new year because of her schedule.