The crowd was so hushed in courtroom 4E that one could hear the click of the ratchets as a deputy locked handcuffs around Aimee Michael’s wrists. Aimee Michael was charged with five counts of vehicular homicide, one count of serious injury by vehicle and six counts of hit and run. Moments earlier, at 1:45 p.m., a foreman had read the jury’s verdict in the criminal case for an Easter 2009 crash that killed five people: guilty on all 13 felony and two misdemeanor counts.
The decision in Fulton County Superior Court could send Michael, 24, to prison for the rest of her life. She was found guilty of causing an April 12, 2009 chain-reaction crash on Camp Creek Parkway and then fleeing the scene and trying to cover it up. She and her mother paid someone to repair the car she was driving.
Michael betrayed little emotion during the trial, and she did not change her behavior when the verdict was read. She looked straight ahead, avoiding eye contact with the jury and with everyone else. Her father, a former Marine who was in Saudia Arabia working for the Department of Defense at the time of the crash, sat behind her, back in the gallery, as usual. This time his eyelids were fluttering.
Tracie and Morris Johnson, the parents of a girl killed in the crash, also sat quietly in the gallery. Tracie lifted a tissue to her face. Later, outside the courtroom, Morris Johnson criticized the Michael family for what he saw as a lack of remorse.
“Aimee, her mother and her father never offered any sentiment,” Johnson said. “No eye contact as to say, ‘we’re sorry.'” Michael was 22 at the time of the crash. A recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh, she was on an ice cream run to a Publix in her parents’ gold BMW 740 iL. She swerved into a silver Mercedes driving in the lane to her left, and both cars spun out of control and across the median, into oncoming traffic.
The Mercedes crashed head-on into a tan Volkswagen Beetle. Killed in the crash were Mercedes driver Robert Carter and his wife, Delisia, plus their 2-month-old son, Ethan Carter, and Delisia Carter’s daughter Kayla Lemons, 9. In the Volkswagen, Morgan Johnson, 6, was killed. Her mother, Tracie, now 44, survived but suffered broken legs, a broken hip and collarbone and damage to her spleen and liver.
For the next 10 days, police would search frantically for the gold BMW, using pieces of the car that were ripped away in the crash to identify it. Finally, based on tips from suspicious neighbors, an officer found it in the driveway of the Michaels’ south Fulton County home, its body repaired and smelling of fresh paint.
Hours later, Michael went to police headquarters with her mother and grandmother to give an interview. She initially denied any involvement in the crash, and claimed any damage to the car existed when it was bought at auction, according to a video recording that was played for jurors. But she ultimately admitted she was in the crash and that she then fled the scene and had the car repaired. Her mother, Sheila Michael, was an Atlanta elementary school teacher at the time. She helped pay for the car repair and drove it from the body shop. She pleaded guilty Oct. 18, two days before her daughter’s trial, to two felonies: tampering with evidence and hindering the apprehension of a criminal, and is being held at the Fulton County Jail. Mother and daughter are to be sentenced Thursday at 9 a.m.
Though she hid her emotions for most of the trial, Michael did bring a tissue to her face when she saw herself in the video recording of her police interview early in the trial. An hour into that interview, police confront her with their evidence, and she admits that she was in the crash. “Somebody has to pay for this,” she told her interrogator. “And I’m going to jail for a long time.”
It was a prescient observation. Judge Kimberly M. Esmond Adams will have significant latitude during sentencing. The judge could reach for the minimum prison sentence on the charges and run them concurrently, said J. Tom Morgan, a criminal defense attorney in Decatur. Or she could pile on the maximum on each count and require Michael to serve them consecutively, said Morgan, a former DeKalb County District Attorney.
The most serious felony charge — vehicular homicide in the first degree — carries a prison term of three to 15 years on each of the five counts. Another big charge, serious injury by vehicle, could put Michael behind bars for one to 15 years. The six counts of hit and run, also a felony, are punishable by one to five years in prison each. And the felony tampering with evidence could add three years to the sentence.
The two misdemeanors were for traffic offenses – reckless driving and failure to maintain a lane – could each net up to a year behind bars. Michael rejected a plea deal from the office of Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard that would have gotten her 50 years in prison. http://www.wsbtv.com/video/25638885/
