collision in text messages. and in those messages the prosecutor said was the evidence he believed required him to press criminal charges against that girl doctors had quite miraculously saved, justine winter. charges of murder. the prosecutor lays out his case while jason gets yet another shock. coming up he s suing you. for her pain and suffering. when dateline continues.
but, as the news and the grief spread, there was still hope, remember, for one of the victims in the crash. justine winter was alive, though barely with a broken neck and broken leg and major internal injuries. doctors told the family they didn t think she d live through the airlift to a hospital in seattle. what did they tell you? they said she wouldn t live. i said, well, she s flying in that airplane, and don t even give me any grief. and she did survive the flight to seattle and the emergency operations to stitch together the broken pieces of her body. she was unconscious when she arrived. the doctors kept her that way, induced a coma so she could avoid the pain or recognition of her desperate condition while her body slowly, slowly began to knit itself back together. until, more than a month later
investigators are convinced that justine winter intentionally crashed her car into erin thompson s, killing the pregnant mom and her 13-year-old son, caden. their evidence threatening text messages sent by justine just minutes before the fatal collision. here again is keith morrison. the sorrow ran deep in flathead county in that sum earp of 2009. deep and wide the whole valley, in fact the country, heard about the crash that killed caden and erin and her unborn child and the strange and disturbing story that 16-year-old justine winter
matter of hours really, to solve the mystery of who and what caused this crash. in fact, the highway patrol officers who raced to this scene in the construction zone believed that justine winter s car was the one that crossed the center line and smashed into erin thompson s car. but the worst of it, the inconceivable part was, at least as investigators told flathead county attorney ed corrigan, this was not an accident at all. what was your first reaction? what did you think? nuts. this is the last thing i wanted, was to have to take a double fatality and have to now treat it as a homicide. homicide? yes. right there in justine s car officers found what amounted to a minute-by-minute narrative of the events leading up to the
agreed. justine winter s car encroached into the northbound lane striking mrs. thompson s vehicle. but what evidence was there that justine had done it, as the law says, purposefully? investigators pulled the so-called black box out of justine s pontiac, analyzed the data, and found another sign that pointed to suicide. she had taken off her seat belt. the black box also recorded speed, acceleration, and braking and found that justine was accelerating, flooring it so to speak, in the five seconds before the crash, speeding up from 81 to 86 miles an hour before hitting the brakes at the last second. she did not swerve. and she drove head-on into that other vehicle. to back it up, prosecutors pulled the speedometer from