EVERETT — Rachael Kamin was unconscious and bleeding from the head when police officers pulled her from the wreckage of her Honda CRV, then lying toppled over on a downtown Everett sidewalk.
Kamin, a nurse, was driving home from her shift at Providence Regional Medical Center Everett when she crossed paths with Joseph Strange.
Strange had been barreling down Rucker Avenue in a stolen pickup truck, trying to outrun Bothell police, a Snohomish County jury was told Wednesday. He ran a red light and plowed into the passenger side of Kamin’s vehicle, pushing it some 160 feet.
“The officers remember seeing a cloud of dust and glass,” Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Tobin Darrow said. “It looked like there had been an explosion.”
Kamin, a mother of two, suffered fatal head injuries in the May 12, 2013, crash. She was removed from life support and died two days later. She was 40.
Lawyers gave opening statements Wednesday in what is expected to be a two-week trial.
Strange, 35 is charged with first-degree murder under the theory that he caused Kamin’s death “under circumstances manifesting extreme indifference to human life.”
Strange also is charged with second-degree murder. Under that theory he is accused causing Kamin’s death while trying to outrun the cops.
Darrow spent much of his opening statements walking jurors through the events that led up to the deadly crash. The jury got its first look at the pursuit route that spanned between Bothell and Everett. Speeds reached up to 90 mph.
Darrow will have to prove that Strange knew he was endangering lives but continued to race away from the cops.
Jurors were told that Strange crashed into two vehicles in a Lynnwood convenience store parking lot, including Bothell police officer Mark Atterbury’s patrol car. A Bothell police sergeant had called off the pursuit earlier but Atterbury picked up the chase again after his car was hit in the parking lot, Darrow said.
He believed what happened there was dangerous enough to reactivate the pursuit, Darrow said.
Strange’s attorney, public defender Donald Wackerman, urged jurors to keep an open mind and to listen carefully to all the evidence presented, particularly how police described the risks they perceived during the chase.
“There is no dispute that this is a horrible tragedy” and that Strange bears some criminal responsibility, he said. But convicting his client of first-degree murder would just create more harm, the defense attorney said.
Wackerman said evidence will show that Bothell police disregarded their own policies when they began chasing Strange and didn’t back off, despite being told by their sergeant to do so.
A surveillance tape shows the circumstances of the crash outside the convenience store don’t match the officer’s description of Strange trying to ram him with the truck, the lawyer said. While prosecutors are now claiming that the chase presented a grave risk to the public, that’s not how officers were behaving that night, nor how they described the pursuit when defending their actions during the police department’s internal review, Wackerman said.
“No one involved in that action that night recognized a grave risk of death, and that is what the state has to prove,” he said.
Atterbury was given a one-day suspension for his involvement in the pursuit. The officer misjudged the situation, but that was not a willful or deliberate act of wrongdoing, the Bothell Police Chief Carol Cummings wrote.
“I want to clearly state that the cause of this tragedy rests squarely on the shoulders of the suspect,” she wrote to the officer. “His actions that night showed repeated disregard for the life and safety of his fellow citizens.”
Since the crash, the Bothell Police Department has adopted stricter policies regarding when officers can engage in car chases. The policy changes already were in the works before May 12, 2013.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463, hefley@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @dianahefley
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