A Denver jury began deliberating Tuesday whether to hold Sandra Jacobson responsible for killing two Connecticut librarians in a crash on the road to Denver International Airport.
Jacobson is accused of vehicular homicide, driving drunk and leaving the scene of the accident that killed Katie McClelland, 71, and Kathleen Krasniewicz, 54. Both women were passengers in a taxi van that ran off Peña Boulevard and rolled over after colliding with Jacobson’s truck.
Jury members deliberated for four hours Tuesday before leaving for the night. They will resume at 8:30 a.m. today.
In closing arguments, prosecutors contended that Jacobson’s blood-alcohol level in midmorning on Jan. 28, 2009, was extrapolated to be 0.274 percent — more than three times the legal limit for intoxication — and that she caused the crash by swerving into the taxi’s lane.
Charles Elliott, Jacobson’s attorney, contended that she drank no alcohol until she arrived at the airport, swigging a “road pop” of 99-proof banana schnapps and Vitamin Water, and that the taxi driver could have caused his passengers’ deaths.
“You have been presented with two different worlds,” prosecutor Darryl Shockley told the jury. “The first is reality. The second is Sandra Jacobson’s world.”
He suggested that she concocted a preposterous story — that she was unaware of the collision and happened to find and chug a liquor-laced water bottle afterward — because that was the only way to beat the criminal charges she faces.
Elliott told the jury that prosecution witnesses had offered “six separate and distinct versions of this accident” and that one police witness had acknowledged the braking taxi could have gone off the road even without the impact of the collision.
“Who hit who?” he asked.
He also noted that police investigators failed to notice Jacobson was intoxicated or check her blood-alcohol level for hours after the crash, possibly because she had consumed liquor afterward that gradually took effect.
He said it made no sense otherwise that she would seem drunker in midafternoon, failing roadside sobriety tests and having a blood-alcohol level of 0.164 percent, than she did when police stopped her at the airport.
“If you’re falling down at a 0.16, you’re simply not better at a 0.274,” he said.
