CENTENNIAL — In the seconds after a pickup rammed into an Aurora ice-cream parlor, Enely Kudlis looked around frantically for her 3-year-old son, Marten.
“Everything started flying; an electric shock went through you,” Kudlis said Wednesday during the trial of the man accused of causing the collision that killed her son and two women. “I didn’t see Marten sitting in the seat. I saw him lying on the pavement outside. He had an electric (box) around his neck.
“I kept asking, ‘Is he breathing?’ “
Kudlis fought back tears Wednesday as she testified in Arapahoe County District Court about the horrific accident that killed her son in September 2008.
Francis Hernandez faces 19 charges related to the wreck, which also killed Patricia Guntharp, 49, and Debra Serecky, 51.
Authorities say Hernandez was traveling south on South Havana Street near East Mississippi Avenue, going at least 70 mph in a 40-mph zone, when he ran a red light in a Suburban and smashed into the pickup that Guntharp was driving. Serecky was her passenger.
The force of the crash sent Guntharp’s pickup into the glass windows of the ice-cream shop.
Enely Kudlis was at the counter of the Baskin-Robbins store, ordering ice cream for her son and a friend when the accident happened.
“It did not enter her mind that this would be the last time she would be able to do anything with Marten Kudlis, that this would be the last time she would see her son alive,” prosecutor Rich Orman said.
But defense attorneys noted that Guntharp was loaded on a “dangerously high amount” of methamphetamine and that she crossed a double yellow line turning into a strip mall when Hernandez broadsided her pickup, calling it a “grossly negligent action.”
Orman said Colorado law allows crossing a double yellow line if it is safe to do so and does not impede oncoming traffic.
Defense attorney David Lipka also suggested someone else may have been driving the Suburban. He said several witnesses said they saw two people either inside or leaving the vehicle just after the accident.
Hernandez, who is from Guatemala, was in the United States illegally and did not have a valid driver’s license. He had been arrested 16 times before, including for numerous traffic offenses, but was never deported.
Several people who were inside the Baskin-Robbins took the stand Wednesday, including Nimra Bukhari, who was with the Kudlises at the ice-cream parlor. She was at the same table as Marten but managed to escape major injury.
“I thought there was an earthquake that struck,” said Nimra, now 12 years old. “I was astonished.”
Haley Tepe was inside the ice-cream shop as well. Debris from the crash cut her left leg so badly that someone from the store used an apron as a tourniquet to stop the bleeding.
“It happened so fast but so slow,” Tepe testified. “I looked down, and my whole leg was bloody.”
Dawn Bouchard said she heard a loud boom, then it went dark and silent.
“It stopped,” she said of the noise, “and a lady started screaming, ‘My son, my son! Oh, my God, where’s my son?’ “
Testimony resumes today. The trial is expected to last two weeks.
