EVERETT — A Snohomish County Superior Court judge didn’t believe the Marysville man’s story.
Six weeks after a teacher had been struck by a car while jogging, Marysville detectives showed up at David Antle’s house. An anonymous tip had identified Antle as the driver who fled the scene of the Dec. 22, 2014, crash.
The teacher, 53, suffered a bruised lung, five broken ribs and multiple lacerations to her liver.
Antle first told the detectives that his car was damaged when he’d hit a deer near Stevens Pass. The officers pressed on and Antle admitted that he’d struck the Marysville jogger and drove off. He told police he didn’t see her and first assumed he’d hit a deer.
Later he said, “I pretty much figured that it was a person right off the bat … and then I was just kind of like, well, what was this person doing in the road?” according to court records.
Antle, 26, stuck with the deer story last week before he was sentenced to eight months in jail.
Judge Richard Okrent told the Marysville man he didn’t believe him. Even so, Okrent agreed to allow Antle to serve his sentence on work release. The defendant had pleaded guilty to a hit-and- run injury accident last month. He faced up to a year in jail.
Antle has a prior felony conviction for attempting to elude police. He also has misdemeanor convictions for reckless driving and for possessing alcohol when he was a minor. He is expected to lose his driver’s license.
In her letter to the judge, the jogger urged Okrent to sentence Antle to a year in jail. How could the defendant drive off and leave her on the side of the road?
The woman was running northbound on 83rd Avenue NE in Marysville. It was dark, and she was jogging against traffic. She told police that she was running on the shoulder. She jogged on the fog line when she encountered a stretch of road without a shoulder. The woman saw an oncoming car and moved to an adjacent grassy area to wait for the car to pass, Snohomish County deputy prosecutor Tobin Darrow wrote in court papers.
“The driver had swerved over the fog line and hit me. My head was thrown forward, and I can still hear the sound of my head hitting the hood of the vehicle,” she wrote.
The mother of two was thrown into a ditch. She saw Antle stop at the crest of the hill before he drove away, leaving her alone.
“He had no idea whether I was dead or alive,” the woman wrote.
Antle later hid his Dodge Journey until he could buy parts to replace the ones damaged in the collision. He lived a few blocks from the crash scene.
Diana Hefley: 425-339-3463; hefley@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @dianahefley.
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