A defective steering component is to blame for a 2012 car crash that killed a Little Rock grandmother, attorneys for a Sherwood man accused of drunkenly causing the fatal collision told a Pulaski County jury on Tuesday.
Mack Louis Hinson III of Sherwood is charged with negligent homicide over the October 2012 three-car crash that killed Narjis Meti in the 12900 block of Cantrell Road by the Centre at Ten shopping center. No one else was seriously injured.
Police said the 60-year-old Meti died instantly when a three-quarter-ton Dodge 2500 pickup collided with the 2005 Mazda 6 she was driving. She had been on her way home after spending time with her grandsons and a daughter in Maumelle.
But police and prosecutors blame Hinson -- not the pickup driver -- for the crash, telling the jury on Tuesday that the 37-year-old Hinson, driving a 2012 Toyota Prius, collided with the pickup and forced it out of its lane and into oncoming traffic where it struck Meti's Mazda almost exactly where she was sitting behind the wheel.
Hinson faces up to 20 years in prison on the Class B felony charge if convicted.
Proceedings before Circuit Judge Barry Sims resume at 9 a.m. today.
Deputy prosecutor Kelly Ward told jurors that Hinson was "barreling down" the stretch of Cantrell, which has a 45 mph speed limit, when he struck the curb then steered hard to the left into the pickup and forced it into the deadly crash.
Hinson's blood-alcohol content was 0.12 percent when the state's legal limit is 0.08, she said. The car's "black box" showed the car had reached 70 mph just before hitting the truck, Ward told jurors.
Several other drivers who'd seen the wreck stopped to help because the wreck was so obviously horrific, she said. But not Hinson, who didn't return to the scene for 30 minutes, Ward said.
"You know who didn't stop? Mack Hinson. He keeps driving," the prosecutor said, accusing him of trying to cover up his drinking. "This defendant who was involved in the accident didn't try to help."
Police found a wet stain that smelled like alcohol under his steering wheel, but he told police he had only consumed two alcoholic beverages that day -- rum punch -- about four hours before the collision, Ward said.
But defense attorneys David Cannon and John Collins told jurors the crash was a "horrible accident" that couldn't be blamed on their client, with police refusing to consider the evidence that would exonerate him.
They scoffed at the prosecutor's accusations, saying that Hinson wasn't driving faster than anyone else on the road. Cannon urged the nine men and three women on the jury to focus on the pickup driver, 42-year-old Chad Mitchell of North Little Rock, and the broken tie rod on his left front wheel.
The rod had been the subject of two recalls, one for the rod itself, with the second recall -- initiated after the collision -- being for the parts used to repair the part, Cannon told jurors. He showed jurors pictures of the broken part, a critical steering component, and pointed to the testimony of witness 62-year-old Dan Crossett.
Crossett, a Little Rock sports-car racer who also teaches the sport, described seeing Mitchell's left tire flexing unusually just before the truck hit the Mazda. He witnessed the collision, with his wife, from behind the Meti vehicle. That kind of flex is a sure sign that Mitchell's truck had lost steering because of the rod break, Cannon told jurors.
Mitchell, who was on his way home after a trip to Pinnacle Mountain State Park, tested positive for marijuana, and Cannon suggested he might have been under the influence, questioning witnesses whether Mitchell appeared intoxicated after the crash. Mitchell told jurors he hadn't smoked the drug for weeks before the crash, and witnesses said he seemed fine, but shaken up, from the collision.
Recalling the collision and Meti's death was an emotional experience for some witnesses.
Tom Baker, a 56-year-old salesman who was making a furniture delivery that day, said he was lucky the pickup didn't hit him. He teared up as he described how he ran up to Meti's car, hoping his small medical training could help her, only to watch as another passerby unsuccessfully searched for a pulse.
The impact had destroyed the driver's side of the car, Baker said.
Wiley Branton Jr., the 63-year-old Circuit Court judge, said he saw the collision while on his way home from Two Rivers Park. The impact of the crash "peeled back [the roof of the Meti car] like it was a convertible," Branton testified. He choked up as he recalled how the "horrific" crash began when an 8,000-pound pickup "shot up into the air," turned upside down, then landed and slid into the curb.
"I've never seen a vehicle raise up in the air like that," he told jurors.
Former emergency medical nurse Tarrie Boggs of Maumelle, 46, said she and her 11-year-old son had been on the way home from work when she drove up on the crash, with the pickup still shaking from the impact. She said she repeatedly checked Meti for signs of life but could find nothing before helping to cover her remains with a blanket from another driver.
Metro on 12/10/2014