EVERETT — Karen Schmidt on Thursday faced the driver who hit and killed her mom and stepfather.
And she forgave him.
“He made a mistake,” the teenager said. “We all make mistakes and sometimes they’re just more dire than others.”
On Thursday, Snohomish County Superior Court Judge Karen Moore sentenced that driver, Elliott Bagley, to just under eight years in prison.
On Jan. 20, 2022, Bagley stayed out until almost 2 a.m. at a pub with a friend, according to court filings. He left, driving on Highway 9 through Arlington.
As Bagley, now 30, drove in his Chevy Malibu, Tausha Schmidt and Justin Wilkerson went to get cigarettes at 7-Eleven. Karen Schmidt remembers saying goodbye.
At 2:26 a.m., they reportedly entered the convenience store on that rainy morning with their umbrellas.
Three minutes later, they left the store after buying their smokes. Surveillance video shows their umbrellas as the couple walks to the corner of Highway 9 and 204th Street NE, according to an Arlington police officer’s report. Another officer noted the road was dark with some illumination from street lights and surrounding businesses.
Tausha Schmidt and Wilkerson go north across 204th Street using the crosswalk at the four-way intersection.
• 2:33:42 a.m.: The walk signal activates for them to cross Highway 9’s southbound lanes.
• 2:33:49 a.m.: The signal changes to a flashing red hand, indicating the traffic light on Highway 9 was still red but would be changing soon.
• 2:33:55 a.m.: The Chevy Malibu hits Tausha Schmidt and Wilkerson without slowing down, prosecutors alleged.
• 2:34:15 a.m.: The red hand on the crosswalk signal stops flashing.
Tausha Schmidt ended up in a turn lane just south of the intersection. Wilkerson was on the shoulder. Both were pronounced dead at the scene. They were 39.
At the crash scene, Bagley told an officer he’d had two beers a few hours prior, according to a police report. He reported he’d had a green light. Police, however, found the light was red at the time of the crash, according to the video footage.
Toxicology results later found Bagley’s blood-alcohol content was 0.13, above the legal limit of 0.08.
Meanwhile, for hours after the crash, Karen Schmidt stayed up waiting for her mom and stepfather to return home, she said in an interview last year. She stayed up until she needed to get her two younger brothers ready for school. When one of her brothers woke up that morning, he asked where his parents were. Karen had no clue. That brother went to school. Then, she took her youngest brother to school.
She got home and didn’t know what to do.
Karen Schmidt walked her dog down to the 7-Eleven in the rain. There, she saw all the police cars blocking off Highway 9. She walked up to one and asked what was going on. The officer told her there was a crash.
“I was already feeling myself starting getting this feeling of dread, like I knew something bad had happened,” she told The Daily Herald.
She asked if it was two cars or some other kind of crash. “No,” the officer responded. It was a car and two pedestrians. She broke down in tears, knowing who those two pedestrians were. Tausha Schmidt and Wilkerson never would’ve left the three kids alone. It had been hours.
So she walked home in the rain with her dog, crying the whole way. There was nothing else to do.
An online fundraiser brought in nearly $73,000 for Karen Schmidt and her brothers.
In August, a year and a half after prosecutors charged him, the defendant pleaded guilty to two counts of vehicular homicide.
Under state sentencing guidelines, he faced between almost eight and nearly 10½ years in prison. The prosecutors and defense recommended the low end of that range. Judge Moore followed the recommendation.
“My hope is that you’ll use that time, Mr. Bagley, to earn the forgiveness that these people have blessed you with and to really contemplate that,” she said, “and that Tausha’s own daughter is willing to forgive you because that is miraculous. So earn that.”
In a letter to the judge, Bagley wrote that he takes “full responsibility” for killing Tausha Schmidt and Wilkerson.
“My decisions to drive that night caused the death of two people and its something I will have to live with for the rest of my life,” he wrote. “I regret driving that night and have decided to live a sober life going forward.”
Bagley, who appeared in court Thursday in glasses and a gray button-up shirt, was a well-respected Costco employee with no criminal history.
“At the same time, the fact that we have to learn to live with our pain, he has to live with his pain,” Karen Schmidt said in court Thursday. “He knows and feels the same. He understands that he made a mistake that changed people’s lives. And that he’s going to have to live with his consequences. For me, that’s punishment enough.”
Jake Goldstein-Street: 425-339-3439; jake.goldstein-street@heraldnet.com; Twitter: @GoldsteinStreet.
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