‘He stole the other half of me:’ Drunk driver who wrecked 4 families faces judgment day

Life and death. Forgiveness and pain. Love and loss.

All of it played out in an overflowing Spartanburg, S.C., courtroom that felt like a Shakespearean tragedy Wednesday afternoon in a plea hearing for Yuriy Karpik, who drove drunk in February 2020 and caused a horrendous wreck that killed two USC Union softball teammates and injured two others.

Five days before his trial, and after five postponements for various reasons, Karpik pleaded guilty to five charges stemming from the deaths of Mia Stokes and Grace Revels and the injuries to their two teammates, including Mia’s identical twin sister Mallory, due to his drunk driving.

“I broke four families’ hearts that night,” Karpik said during a tearful six-minute statement in court in which he also asked for forgiveness from the victims’ families.

By pleading guilty, Karpik threw himself on the mercy of S.C. Circuit Court Judge R. Keith Kelly, who had sole authority to determine his sentence.

The victims’ families urged Kelly to keep Karpik behind bars for decades. The maximum sentence could have been well over 40 years, depending on how the judge structured his ruling.

“We were Mallory and Mia Stokes, a package deal forever,” said Mallory Stokes, Mia’s twin, in her statement advocating a maximum sentence for Karpik. “Then he stole the other half of me that night, and he didn’t have to.”

After two hours of victim impact statements, photos of the crash scene, testimonials to Karpik’s character and Biblical verses quoted by both sides, Kelly made his ruling.

Karpik, 27, would serve a 20-year prison sentence, followed by at least five more years of home detention.

But Karpik likely won’t be in prison 20 years from now. He has already served three years in jail while awaiting his court-case outcome.

Under S.C. law, Karpik will have to serve at least 85% of the 20-year sentence in prison imposed Wednesday. That means for 17 years out of the 20 he will need to be imprisoned, and he’s already served three of them.

So in roughly 14 years, sometime in 2037 when he is 41 years old, Karpik will be eligible for release to home detention, barring any appeals.

“I’m a little disappointed,” Holly Stokes, Mia’s mother, said of the sentence. “I hoped it was going to be longer.”

“But,” Eric Stokes, Mia’s father, added, “whatever it was, it wasn’t going to bring Mia back to us.”

Mallory Stokes, Mia’s identical twin, characterized the end of the plea hearing, and the court case, as “a weight off of all of our shoulders.”

As for Karpik asking them for forgiveness, few of the Stokes or Revels family members — who called their daughter “Gracie” and said she had planned to become a special-education teacher — were willing to offer it on the spot.

“I feel like that’s kind of a tough pill to swallow,” Mallory Stokes said. “But I kind of expected it. It’s hard for me to even think about that right now, because what we have is so tragic. And I’m still learning how to live without Mia.”

Revels was from Lancaster, S.C., and was known to her family members as a sweet young woman with a penchant for saying funny things they called “Grace-isms.” A rare moment of levity in court Wednesday came when Connie Revels, Grace’s mother, said her daughter told her once when she was a young child that a nearby stuffed animal in a store was actually called a “taxidermy.”

“Why would you say that?” Connie Revels asked.

“Because it says, ‘Don’t touch the taxidermy,’ ” Grace declared proudly.

Mallory and Mia Stokes, from northwest Charlotte, went to Lincoln Charter in Denver and played softball there together. Their looks were so mirror-image that the fact Mallory had earrings for a few months before Mia did was eagerly seized upon as a way by classmates and teachers as a way to tell them apart.

You could also figure out who was who if you happened to see the Stokes twins park their shared Ford Mustang at high school, the one that was later destroyed in the wreck. Mallory would pull in bumper-first, while Mia always backed into parking spots.

The twins had just begun their first college softball season at USC Union in February 2020 and had left Academy Sports at around 10 p.m. on Feb. 7 after buying long-sleeved undershirts for the next day’s game. (Mallory Stokes has never played a competitive game of softball again since the wreck, although she did help coach a middle-school softball team at Lincoln Charter this past season).

Karpik, meanwhile, was coming the other way on a highway where the speed limit was about to drop from 45 mph to 30 mph around a turn. Another USC Union softball teammate of Stokes and Revels, Devyn Royce, was driving the Stokes’ car and never had time to hit her brakes before impact. Like Mallory Stokes, she was also injured in the crash but recovered. (The four families whose hearts Karpik said he had broken in his statement referred to the Royces, Stokes, Revels and his own).

S.C. Solicitor Barry Barnette said in court that Karpik’s “medical” blood alcohol content when it was first tested after the wreck was .209 and that, 80 minutes later when he was tested again for legal purposes, it was .152. Both numbers were substantially higher than S.C.’s legal limit of .08.

Karpik’s defense attorneys said he had been drinking wine at home, winding down after a long day, when he got a delivery order from a Spartanburg business that he sometime delivered food for and decided to make one final nighttime delivery.

It was after that delivery, headed home, that Karpik veered across the road and ran into the four softball players’ car. There was some dispute whether he was going 75 mph or closer to 85 mph at impact, but in either case he was speeding.

Karpik was 24 and engaged at the time of the wreck, a college graduate of USC Upstate who was substitute teaching in high school while beginning to pursue a career in robotics. Originally from Ukraine, Karpik’s family moved to America before he was a year old. He is one of 13 children, and many of his brothers and sisters were in the courtroom to support him.

Now 27 years old with his engagement ended, he is facing the prospect of at least the next 14 years in prison. He had never been convicted of a serious crime before.

“I understand the need for justice,” Karpik said during his statement to the judge. “But if you could just give me an opportunity …”

Later, the Stokes families shook their heads at that comment.

“What about Mia?” Holly Stokes said. “What about Grace? What happened to their opportunities?”