When she finally admitted to police that she was involved in an Easter 2009 crash that killed five people, Aimee Michael’s voice dropped to a whisper.
“Somebody has to pay for this, and I’m going to jail for a long time,” she said.
Jurors heard her voice for the first time Monday, the fourth day of her criminal trial, when the prosecution played a video of the interview she gave Fulton County police 11 days after the chain-reaction crash on Camp Creek Parkway.
Michael, 24, is accused of causing a four-car crash in her parents’ gold BMW, then fleeing the scene to have the car repaired and the evidence destroyed. She is charged with five counts of vehicular homicide, one count of serious injury by vehicle and six counts of hit and run, plus misdemeanor counts of tampering with evidence, reckless driving and failure to maintain a lane.
The daughter of an Atlanta elementary school teacher and a Department of Defense employee, Michael had graduated the year before from the University of Pittsburgh with a major in psychology. She had planned to go on to business school -- and even filed an application with Wake Forest University four days after the crash.
But her ice cream run to a Publix in her parent’s car that day has changed her life. She could spend decades in prison. Her mother, Sheila, pleaded guilty last week before the trial started to counts of tampering with evidence and hindering the apprehension of a criminal. She was taken to the Fulton County Jail and is to be sentenced at the end of her daughter’s trial.
Michael’s lawyer said in his opening statement in Fulton County Superior Court on Wednesday that his client is guilty of fleeing the scene but that the driver of a silver Mercedes next to her caused the crash. Michael is not guilty of killing those other people, said the lawyer, W. Scott Smith.
The prosecution and the defense agree that the BMW and the Mercedes bumped off each other in the eastbound lane and then spun out of control into oncoming traffic. The only question is who caused the initial bump. What happened next is fairly clear, according to witness accounts, autopsies and crash scene reconstructions: The Mercedes collided with a Volkswagen Beetle, then burst into flames.
A medical examiner testified that Robert and Delisia Carter died on impact in the Mercedes and that their 2-month-old son, Ethan Carter, and Delisia Carter’s daughter Kayla Lemons, 9, were killed almost instantly from the heat of the fire.
In the Volkswagen, Morgan Johnson, 6, was killed. Her mother, Tracie, 43, survived but suffered broken legs, a broken hip and collarbone and damage to her spleen and liver. A Grady Memorial Hospital surgeon who operated on Johnson said he spent eight hours working on her multiple broken bones and that a third of patients with similar injuries die.
A westbound Honda Accord also was caught in the crashes, but the woman driving it was not hurt and neither were her two children.
Aimee Michael collided with no other vehicles and fled the scene, she says in the video recording of the interview she gave police hours after they seized the BMW in her driveway.
She told police that the crash sequence started when she steered right to avoid a car coming into her lane and “when I turned back, the car just started spinning. And when it stopped, it just stopped, and I didn’t realize what happened. And when I looked in my rear view, it was just flames.”
While watching herself say this in the video, the real-time Aimee Michael seated next to her attorneys brought a tissue to her nose. For most of the trial to date, she had been sitting stoically, looking straight ahead.
Several times during the 2 ½- hour interview, Michael calmly denied being involved in the crash. But an hour into it, when police told her they had evidence proving that her family’s BMW 740 iL had left debris behind at the crash scene, she broke down and admitted her role.
An investigator tried to console Michael while pressing her for more information. It was an accident, he told her.
“No,” she responded, crying. “It doesn’t matter that it was an accident. They’re all gone.”
The trial is ongoing and the prosecution is expected to rest its case by Tuesday. Then, Smith, the defense attorney, is expected to produce witnesses who will explain why Robert Carter, the Mercedes driver, could have caused the fatal series of crashes. Judge Kimberly M. Esmond Adams has said the trial could run through Friday.
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