took deadly aim at erin s on coming car, crossed the center line, and plowed right into them on purpose. shocking? oh, yes. as was the alleged reason. justine, said the police, was trying to commit suicide. how did they know? they found the evidence on justine s phone, they said, text messages which she wrote herself and which once county attorney ed corrigan saw them gave him no choice, he said. he charged her with deliberate homicide, montana s equivalent of murder. justine purposely went into the wrong lane of traffic and smashed head-on into another car. by doing so, she should have known her actions could have killed somebody, and under those circumstances i think deliberate homicide was the only charge we could file. you decide to charge her as an adult. why? she was 16. she was.
also that the companies had failed to adequately construct and maintain the vicinity causing hazardous and confusing conditions for the traveling public. i can t even begin to guess what they were thinking about when they decided to file that lawsuit. it inflamed the whole town. the whole town. this wasn t justine s decision. that was a decision made by her attorneys. ah, yes, the attorneys. their names? maxwell battle and david stoft. according to the winters, the attorneys assured them the lawsuit, assuming justine was found not guilty, would give them a better shot at an insurance company reimbursement later. there was no intent of going for the estate, making that family endure more than they ve already endured. but the optics were awful. oh, the timing could have been who knows better. you pick up the newspaper, you look at the blogs, you hear the radio and what you got was, those awful people, those disgusting, terrible people. what are they thinking, trying t
okay for them. after serving a little more than four years in prison, justine was granted parole. for erin s widower jason, the dream is gone. only an empty chair, an empty ache remain as he and so many in the family, as if climbing those montana mountains, try to keep putting one foot in front of the other. it s a dance between the grief of their loss to the joy and the blessing of having experienced them. it s like seeing a meteor. you wouldn t curse your luck that you saw this meteor. you d just be thankful that you were blessed to see it. so we just have to cling to that, that wow, how amazing that we got to spend a good part of our life with two of the most precious people on the planet.
as a montana jury prepared to decide the fate of 17-year-old justine winter, the members of erin and caden s family struggled to hang on to the frayed remnants of their former good will. they had tried so hard not to be angry at justine. that is, until they were served with that lawsuit, blaming the crash on erin, and then watched defense attorneys battle and stoft twist, what they thought anyway, twist what they believed were the facts of the case. these are unusual victims because of this willingness to forgive justine. it s the adults in her life who are steering her in this direction. it s not her decisions. you know, it s these adults. so i ve had plenty of anger towards them. but for justine s family, too, there was considerable strain.
out of her lane in that construction lane and struck justine. and the defense went further, claiming the slap mark on the 85-mile-an-hour mark on justine s car was planted there by investigators, that the black box that measured speed and braking was plain wrong, that justine always wore her seat belt. and, finally, a psychologist said, what actually a lot of experts said, that a spat with a boy wasn t enough to lead to a suicide attempt. and those texts? they should not be considered a suicide note at all. it was a way of exercising power and control in the relationship, to make that kind of threat, that it was always clear that it was never meant. what would justine winter say about what happened here that night about those texts? the jury would never know. she did not testify on the advice of attorneys, said her family. and, of course, that was her perfect right.