DRIVER WHO KILLED 4 GETS 25 TO LIFE
Authorities: Woman huffed canned air before hitting pedestrians
Emanuel “Manny” Rivas carried around a sketch pad — he loved to draw, his mother said. Younger brother Yovanny Felix always wanted his mom’s attention — he enjoyed sharing how much he loved her.
Manny was days from turning 12 years old. Yovanny was 10.
The brothers, their grandmother Carmela Camacho and her longtime boyfriend Abel Juan Valdez were out for an evening walk in Escondido on May 5, 2020, when they were mowed down by a sedan on a sidewalk. All four died that night. Before the crash, the driver had been huffing canned air, prosecutors said.
On Thursday, as the boys’ mother looked on in Vista Superior Court, driver Ashley Rene Williams was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison.
The sentence handed down by Judge James Simmons Jr. was part of a plea deal. Williams, 30, had been facing 60 years to life before she pleaded guilty in April to seconddegree murder and manslaughter.
“It’s extremely selfish, what you did,” the judge told Williams in a crowded courtroom. “No family should have to bear that.”
As the judge spoke, Norma Espinoza cried in the front row of the courtroom. The 30-year-old mother lost both her sons in the crash. “They were my everything. They were my life,” she said.
She also lost her mother, who she said was her best friend, “the person I could talk to.”
“It’s really hard on me just to think I’ll never tuck my kids in to sleep,” Espinoza told the judge during the hearing Thursday. “Nobody knows how many times I cry myself to sleep ... wishing I could wake up and see them in my home again.”
She spoke slowly and stopped often — to cry, to breathe.
“I think one day, I may forgive her,” Espinoza said of Williams.
“But I don’t think I am ready to do that now. It still hurts.”
Before the hearing started, Williams sobbed at the defense table. She did not make any statements during the hearing, and her attorney declined comment afterward.
The crash happened around 8:30 p.m. May 5, 2020, as the family walked on San Pasqual Valley Road. Williams was driving north in a 2014 Mazda3 when she lost control of the car and veered onto the curb near Oak Hill.
The car was completely on the sidewalk when she ran into the four victims, then plowed into a tree. Valdez and Manny died at the scene. Camacho and Yovanny died that night at a hospital.
At Williams’ preliminary hearing last year, an Escondido police detective testified that toxicology testing showed DFE in Williams’ blood the night of the crash. Investigators found a can of air duster on the passenger’s
side floorboard of Williams’ car.
A few months before the fatal crash, Williams had pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence of a drug. Her driver’s license was suspended at the time of the crash.
The judge also heard from Valdez’s sister, Elvia
Valdez. Through a Spanish language interpreter, she said her brother was “very kind, very respectable and very humble.” She said his death left their mother “torn apart.”
“There is nothing that can kill the emptiness Abel has left,” she said.
Deputy District Attorney Laurie Hauf said Williams’ car drifted 21 feet before it mounted the sidewalk.
The prosecutor said Williams “made a fatal, made a selfish, made a tragic decision that evening: to get high on the way home in her car.”
Escondido police issued a statement saying in part that the case “has been a devastating event for our community.”
“Although the resolution doesn’t erase the tragedy and loss of four members of our community, we hope that justice being served brings some degree of closure and peace to the families and our Escondido community,” interim police Chief David Cramer said.