In the end, it was the cover up that might have mattered most.
The 24-year-old Atlanta woman who fled the scene after causing a crash that killed five people on Easter 2009 will be pushing 60 when she gets out of prison, and the judge who sentenced her said it was the flight from the crash scene that she could not forget.
During a tearful hearing Thursday where many invoked God to explain the tragedy, Aimee Michael was given a 50-year sentence. Judge Kimberly M. Esmond Adams ordered her to to serve 36 years in prison with the rest on probation and added that Michael is permanently banned from obtaining a Georgia driver's license.
The crash destroyed three families. Three children were among the dead in two cars on Camp Creek Parkway on April 12, 2009. And Michael, a recent college graduate from a stable family, had a promising life ahead.
Judge Adams, her voice wavering and her eyes filling with tears said, "It was by far the most tragic case I have ever seen. "
On Monday, a jury convicted Michael of causing a crash that forced a Mercedes to spin out of control into oncoming traffic, resulting in a head-on collision with a Volkswagen Beetle. An entire family was killed in the Mercedes, and a little girl died in the Volkswagen.
Michael fled and tried to cover up her role by arranging repairs to the BMW she had been driving. Her mother, Sheila Michael, pleaded guilty on Oct. 15 to helping with the cover-up.
Adams showed the least mercy to the mother: she sentenced Sheila Michael to the maximum eight years in prison for failing to turn her daughter in to police -- more than even prosecutors had recommended.
The judge said she had "scoured the recesses of my soul" to imagine a scenario where she would "abandon right" to protect her own son.
"I have not found one thing yet," the judge said. She told Sheila Michael, who was an elementary school teacher with a master's degree in business when the crash happened, that when she conspired in the "selfish" cover up, she "inflicted more pain on families that already had experienced the most pain imaginable."
What kind of mother, asked Adams, could have watched repeated news reports about the missing hit and run driver without coming forward. "When she needed you to be her mother, you failed her," Adams said. She noted that Aimee Michael even sought to turn herself in, but her mother discouraged her.
"You discouraged her from doing so because you did not want to lose her," Adams said.
Killed in the crash were the Mercedes driver, Robert Carter; his wife, Delisia; their 2-month-old son, Ethan Carter; and Delisia Carter’s daughter, Kayla Lemons, 9.
In the Volkswagen, Morgan Johnson, 6, was killed. Her mother, Tracie, now 44, survived but suffered broken legs, a broken hip and collarbone and damage to her spleen and liver.
For the next 10 days, police would search frantically for the gold BMW, using pieces of the car that were ripped away in the crash to identify it. Finally, based on tips from neighbors, an officer found it in the driveway of the Michaels’ south Fulton County home, its body repaired and smelling of fresh paint.
Prosecutor Tanya Miller revealed Thursday what the judge had kept from jurors: Police found a "marijuana cigar" in the ashtray of the BMW and it had Aimee Michael's genetic material on it. It wasn't presented at trial because police had no evidence linking it to Michael at the time of the crash, and the judge ruled that it would have been prejudicial for the jury.
"What that does tell us is that she smokes marijuana in the car, in all likelihood while driving," Miller said, adding that Michael admitted in a psychological evaluation that she'd been a "habitual" user of marijuana since her teens.
Miller asked the judge to sentence Aimee Michael to 50 years in prison -- the same penalty that Michael had been offered in a plea deal that she turned down. But for the mother, who had admitted her guilt, Miller recommended only five years, with three of them in prison.
Mother and daughter sat side-by-side during their sentencing hearing. They wore blue Fulton County Jail jump suits, their wrists bound to belly chains.
They each apologized for their actions.
"I want to say that I have wronged," Aimee Michael told the judge, her voice wavering. "I have wronged three families and for that I am sorry." She also apologized to her mother and to "everybody that I have let down."
Sheila Michael, 53, apologized to the victims for any "undue grief" her cover-up caused. "That was not my intention," she said.
Her husband, Robert, had been silent throughout the trial, muzzled by a judge's gag order and by an admonishment from his daughter's attorney.
The former Marine was in the Middle East working for the Department of Defense when the crash occurred.
"I feel that if I was here, in country, at the time, all this never would have taken place," he told the judge. "I can assure you of that."
Robert Michael called his wife his "rock" and "best friend" and said what she did after the crash was out of character.
"My daughter," he continued, "I love her, love her so much. And her actions after the accident I can't explain. All I can tell you is, she wasn't raised that way and she didn't mean it -- she didn't mean to be part of such a horrific accident."
Judge Adams appeared most moved by a man who was at the scene of the crash. James Neal helped to pull Tracie Johnson from the Volkswagen as her dead daughter, Morgan, lay in the back of the car.
Later, he comforted Morgan Johnson's older brother, Morris III, who had been a passenger in a car driven by his father ahead of the crash.
Neal told the judge that the boy actually comforted him, saying that "his sister was gone and now he had an angel."
Judge Adams wiped away a tear when Neal said that.
Later, when issuing her sentences, she said she believed that because it was Easter the skies opened immediately and took all the children to heaven.
"And now," said Adams, her voice wavering, "they are angels, just as young Morris said."
Adams said that, like many, she wondered how things might have turned out differently had Aimee Michael stayed at the scene of the crash, or at least turned herself in soon after.
Adams said she had been consumed the last few days with reaching a fair sentence for her, and that she prayed Thursday morning for one. She said she had a harder time finding an appropriate sentence for Aimee Michael than for her mother.
She said she had considered Aimee Michael's driving record and her marijuana use, but that Michael's flight from the crash scene weighed heavily with her.
"I can tell you Ms. Michael, the one thing that I could not get out of my mind was that you left the scene of the crime," Adams said. Fatal crashes occur all the time the judge said, "but what ultimately matters is what you do when something like that happens."
After the hearing, when Tracie Johnson was asked what she thought of the sentences, she responded: "I'm satisfied."
Earlier, when she was giving her pre-sentencing testimony in the courtroom, she said she was reminded daily of the crash by her physical pain and the absence of her daughter, Morgan.
Yet, she said, she was able to forgive Aimee and Sheila Michael.
"I harbor no hate," Johnson said, "and I just want the defendants to know that I pray for them."
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