Jury sees photos of mangled minivan that 5 victims in fatal crash were in
12:00 AM CDT on Wednesday, August 25, 2010
By VALERIE WIGGLESWORTH / The Dallas Morning News
The 93 photos introduced into evidence Tuesday in a Collin County criminal trial kept coming back to the mangled minivan.
Plano police Officer Richard Smith explained what jurors were seeing: the place where the rented Pontiac G5 speeding west on Legacy Drive in Plano had jumped the curb. The base from which the fire hydrant had been broken off. The tire tracks in the grass where Smith said the car went airborne.
"The defendant's vehicle went through [the minivan]; he didn't hit it but went through it," Smith testified.
The Pontiac then struck the top of a Chevy pickup and finally came to rest on its side near a corner gas station. The minivan, its roof peeled off from the impact, was barely recognizable. Its five occupants – a Plano family on their way home from church – were killed.
"It would have been a miracle for anybody to have survived in that van," Smith said.
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