Hearing held to determine if Rochester driver will face harsher sentence in fatal crash
Feb. 10—ROCHESTER — A hearing was held Wednesday afternoon, Feb. 9, 2022, in Olmsted County District Court to determine the existence of aggravating factors that would allow prosecutors to seek a harsher sentence for the driver in a fatal crash that occurred almost a year ago.
Sterling Haukom, 35, pleaded guilty in December 2021 to a charge of criminal vehicular homicide in the death of 18-year-old Erika Cruz.
Cruz was on her way home from work around 10:20 p.m. on Feb. 24, 2021, when her vehicle was hit at the intersection of Eighth Avenue and 12th Street Southeast, just blocks from her home. She died as a result of her injuries.
In the month after the crash, Chief Deputy Olmsted County Attorney Eric Woodford filed a notice to seek an aggravated sentence for Haukom, which if granted would mean that Haukom would spend longer in prison than prescribed in the sentencing guidelines for the charge.
Woodford has argued that Haukom's high blood alcohol content and the speed at which he was driving were more serious than typically involved in criminal vehicular homicide cases.
On Wednesday, Judge Jacob Allen listened to testimony from three members of the Rochester Police Department, a forensic scientist with the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension and a Rochester woman who was driving behind Cruz's car and witnessed the crash.
Through the testimony of investigator Todd Schwanke, Haukom's recorded interview at the Olmsted County Adult Detention Center from the morning after the crash was played for the court.
In the video, Haukom told Schwanke he had left a Rochester bar upset because he had almost gotten into a fist fight over a "bad joke." Haukom also put his alcohol consumption at about 15 drinks between beer and shots of whiskey.
Sgt. Bert Otto, who serves as a law enforcement phlebotomist, collected a blood sample from Haukom about an hour after the crash while Haukom was at Mayo Clinic Hospital-Saint Marys.
BCA forensic scientist Georginia Peterson conducted the analysis of the sample, which found an alcohol concentration of approximately 0.25 grams per milliliters of blood.
Haukom's attorney, Lauri Traub, did not cross examine either witness nor she did ask questions of Rochester resident Taylor Sullivan who was driving home from work that night and saw the crash.
Sullivan, who began to cry as she described witnessing the crash, said she heard a rumbling of a vehicle before seeing it enter the intersection and hit Cruz's car in front of hers.
"I've always described it like this in the past year, like a bullet. It felt as fast as a bullet," she said.
Rochester police investigator Joel Koch was last to take the stand to testify on data collected by the Ford F150's system.
Koch testified the data showed Haukom going 65 mph in the two-tenths of a second before impact with Cruz's vehicle.
Whether that analysis was accurate was questioned heavily by Traub, who objected to the investigator's analysis, saying the assessment called for an expert opinion, which she believed Koch was not qualified to give.
On cross examination by Traub, Koch testified that he had limited training in interpreting or analyzing the data that pulled from a vehicle's event data recorder.
Koch also testified that he did not make a comparison between the manufacturer specifications on tire size and tire inflation to what was actually on the vehicle that February day, which could affect things such as the vehicle's reading of its speed.
Koch also testified that he could not calculate a measure of uncertainty for the data recorded by the vehicle.
Closing arguments will be made in writing. Judge Allen is expected to issue a ruling within 30 days after all filings have been submitted. A sentencing date will be set at that time.
