GOLDEN — For the next four years, Nanette LaFleur will live, work, receive treatment and take responsibility for her actions while incarcerated in a strict youth-offender facility.
Judge Lily Oeffler chastised LaFleur on Wednesday during sentencing for driving drunk and high on marijuana when she killed Samara Stricklen and seriously injured Seth Mutschler on March 13, 2007.
Oeffler told LaFleur she was “shocked and angry” to discover that since LaFleur was indicted in June 2007, she had tested positive five times for marijuana — the latest on June 3 — and once for methamphetamines.
“You drank and you used drugs. A child was killed and another horribly injured,” Oeffler said. “I cannot imagine an object lesson so severe that you would not learn from it, but you have not.”
Jefferson County District Attorney Scott Storey said he doesn’t know why the pre-sentencing division did not notify his office of the positive drug tests. If it had been known, LaFleur’s bond could have been revoked.
Oeffler also gave LaFleur a 12-year suspended prison sentence — years that she will serve if she does not complete the sentence at the Colorado Department of Corrections’ Youth Offender System facility in Pueblo.
The sentence “will never bring our daughter back,” said Samara’s father, Bill Stricklen. Teens in particular need to “remind each other: Don’t do stupid and foolish things. Don’t choose to drink and drive.”
Stricklen, who is hearing impaired, told the court through a sign-language interpreter that he and Samara’s mother, Michelle, don’t think LaFleur is remorseful.
“She says she’s sorry, but we don’t buy it because we are good at reading people and body language,” Bill Stricklen said. “I hope one day she can say she is sorry and mean it.”
LaFleur, who now is 18, told the court she was “terribly sorry . . . I had no intention to hurt anyone. All I can do is pick up the pieces and move on.”
Storey said LaFleur’s sentence “is not a cakewalk.”
“They will be on top of her every day,” he said. “If I were a betting man, I would bet the odds are not in her favor” of completing the regimen.
LaFleur pleaded guilty in May to vehicular homicide while driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol and vehicular assault-DUI.
It took a grand jury to sort out who was driving. Alison Bowen, whose parents owned the sport utility vehicle involved in the crash, was in the back seat when it crossed the median on West Alameda Parkway and slammed into Mutschler’s Honda Accord.
LaFleur asked Bowen to get in the driver’s seat. Both told police that Bowen was driving. In January, Bowen was sentenced to 45 days in jail and two years of probation.
Liquor store clerk Van Thien Pham, who sold apple vodka to a 15-year-old boy who gave it to LaFleur, was sentenced Wednesday to two years in jail and three years of probation. The sentence also includes nine other counts of providing alcohol to minors.
Ann Schrader: 303-278-3217 or aschrader@denverpost.com
