ATLANTA (AP) — Raquel Nelson and her three children had just stepped off a bus at a stop in Marietta late on the night of April 10, 2010 to return to her apartment complex across the street. Nelson led her children to a median instead of walking to a crosswalk three-tenths of a mile away, according to court records, when her daughter darted safely across the street and her son tried to follow.
That’s when he was fatally struck by an oncoming van driven by Jerry Guy, who had been drinking earlier in the day while taking pain medication, was partially blind and had two previous hit-and-run convictions from 1997, records show.
The decision to prosecute Guy, who fled the scene, was an easy one. He pleaded guilty to hit-and-run charges and was sentenced to six months in prison. But the move to charge Nelson, the grieving mother devastated by her son’s death, struck many as overreach.
She was convicted in July of second-degree vehicular homicide, reckless conduct and jaywalking and sentenced to a year of probation. But she accepted a judge’s offer of a new trial instead. The reckless conduct charge was later dropped, but Sadow and Nelson came to court on Tuesday to request the other two charges, both misdemeanors, be dismissed as well.
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