(March 2) — A man sentenced to eight years in prison for vehicular manslaughter maintains that the guilty party in the accident that killed three people was his 1996 Toyota Camry.
Koua Fong Lee, then 29, was on his way home from church on a Sunday afternoon in June 2006. Also in the car were his pregnant wife, his daughter, father, brother and niece. Upon exiting Interstate 94 in St. Paul, Minn., Lee says, his car inexplicably sped up as he approached an intersection.
“Brakes,” Lee says he shouted to his family as they sped toward two stopped vehicles. “Brakes not working!”
Traveling between 70 and 90 mph, Lee’s Camry slammed into the cars ahead of him, CNN reported, killing 33-year-old Javis Adams and his 10-year-old son, Javis Adams Jr. Another passenger, Devyn Bolton, 6, was paralyzed in the accident and later died from her injuries.
Prosecutors argued that there was nothing wrong with the car and said that Lee had his foot on the gas pedal at the time of the crash, CNN reported. Two examinations conducted by mechanical engineers concluded that the brakes in Lee’s Camry were working properly at the time of the accident.
The jury did not find Lee’s account convincing and convicted him.
“I know that lives were lost that day, but I did everything within my power to try to stop that vehicle,” Lee, who is a Laotian immigrant, recently told CNN affiliate KARE from the Minnesota state prison where he is serving his sentence. “I never intended for this to happen.”
Now, in the wake of massive recalls of Toyota vehicles due to sudden-acceleration problems, Lee’s lawyers are asking that the court re-examine the Camry, which is still impounded.
“We plan to employ experts familiar with the ’96 Camry and the components that make up the car to show that rapid acceleration is to blame for the accident, not Mr. Lee accidentally stepping on the accelerator,” one of Lee’s lawyers, Brent Schaefer, told CNN.
Toyota has issued a recall for several models and years of its vehicles, but the 1996 Camry is not one of them.
Searching the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s database, CNN was able to locate “at least two dozen” complaints from owners of the ’96 Camry concerning “vehicle speed control.”
