(Paulo at right, with her lawyer, and prosecutor Amy Freedheim at left)
By Tracy Record
West Seattle Blog editor
“You took his life – the life Logan had.”
That’s what the family of 29-year-old Logan Wicker, one of two people critically injured when a drunk driver T-boned his car in South Delridge last June, told that driver, 25-year-old Kalameu Paulo of Seatac, in a tearful King County Superior Court sentencing hearing this afternoon.
Logan, who spent more than three months in the hospital, spoke too: “My life was really good before … it’s been changed (forever) … I hope she can never do this to anybody again.” He begins our 23-minute unedited video of all who spoke at the hearing, including, at the end, the judge:
Though she chose not to speak, the other victim in the crash was in the courtroom too. After hearing about the effects of what he acknowledged was a “shattering … tragedy,” Judge Dean Lum formally sentenced Paulo to the recommended 14-month term, though he wondered aloud, “Is this justice? I don’t know.”
As reported here last month, Paulo struck a plea bargain, pleading guilty to two counts of vehicular assault, with prosecutors dropping a third charge of hit-and-run.
But that was the crime, as the deputy prosecuting attorney told Judge Lum, that disturbed Logan’s family the most – “disgust(ed)” them, as Logan’s stepfather put it; the night of the crash, according to the police report, she and her passengers got out of her van after she ran a stop sign and crashed into Logan’s car at 17th and Cambridge.
(WSB photo from June 23, 2013; victims’ car is out of view, blocked by the van)
They were stopped by police as they walked westbound across Delridge Way.
Paulo spent two and a half weeks in jail after being arrested last June and has been in the day-reporting CCAP program since, while undergoing alcohol treatment, her lawyer said. She was taken into custody at the end of the hearing, to start her sentence immediately, and the King County Jail Register confirms she was re-booked as of midafternoon. When she is released from jail, she will be in “community custody” – probation – for more than a year; she also faces a long list of other sanctions and conditions, including restitution payments to be determined later.
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