The screams, alone, haunted bystanders.
Could she hear them? Did she know he was back there — fighting for his life, smoke drifting from his wounds?
Or was this a tragic, unimaginable accident?
After nearly three weeks of hearing evidence and testimony, a jury started weighing those questions on a grim anniversary. The six men and six women deciding Detra Farries’ fate began deliberations Thursday — one year to the day after horrified onlookers honked their horns, waved their arms and desperately shouted for her to stop.
But she didn’t stop, and Allen Lew Rose — the Colorado Springs tow-truck driver attached by the ankles to a tow cable behind Farries’ GMC Suburban — was dragged to his death on Feb. 23, 2011.
Rose, 35, was ensnared at Hill Park Apartments, 360 N. Murray Blvd., as Farries, 33, jumped in her SUV and drove away from an attempted towing.
The cable came off Rose’s tow truck as Farries drove away, but it stayed on her rear axle.
During closing arguments Thursday, prosecutors characterized Farries as a heartless woman who not only felt the clunk of a tow hook as she drove away but saw Rose being dragged through her side mirrors until the moment she managed to “whip” him off her vehicle.
“Why would you drive on the wrong side of the road? You’re jerking your car. You’re trying to get him off of your car,” prosecutor Jeff Lindsey said, referring to the claims of several witnesses.
According to her defense, Farries was a desperate woman but didn’t know a man was being dragged to his death as she fled a $70 tow fee. In the middle of moving her eight children from Denver to Houston, she saw a tow-truck driver and moved to save her family’s belongings, piled high in the back of her vehicle.
Rose, they say, had hooked a cable to her vehicle without her knowledge as she pulled forward, and then ran after her, leading him to get caught up in the cable.
With a loud-running engine, broken side mirrors and no view through her interior rearview mirror, they say, Farries could only make out a green car behind her — which she took to be Rose chasing her in someone else’s vehicle.
She wasn’t looking for something she didn’t know was there, her attorneys say.
Public defender Eydie Elkins asked jurors to set aside horrifying images of Rose’s death and consider whether Farries’ actions met the legal definition of “recklessness” — when someone “consciously disregards a substantial and unjustifiable risk” of death.
“Recklessness” is a requirement for manslaughter and vehicular homicide, two of the felony counts against her.
