Opening statements delivered for woman’s deadly DHS crash trial

A repeat DUI offender ignored the dangers of driving drunk and caused a crash that killed a woman and seriously injured two men in Desert Hot Springs, a prosecutor said Tuesday, but a defense attorney said the
evidence did not show a conscious disregard for human life needed to convict her of second-degree murder.

Mother of DUI driver says daughter should have been in jail

Monica Benavidez, 37, is charged with murder, gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and two counts of drunken driving causing injury, with several sentence-enhancing allegations of causing great bodily injury.

Woman charged in deadly crash has multiple DUIS

Benavidez allegedly had a .21 percent blood-alcohol content — nearly triple the legal limit — when her Toyota Camry crossed the double-yellow lines on Palm Drive and crashed head-on into a Toyota Corolla driven by Rigoberto Cuevas on June 5, 2014.

The crash left Cuevas’ mother-in-law, Desert Hot Springs resident Maria Caballeros, 65, dead at the scene and Cuevas suffering from a traumatic brain injury, respiratory failure, a spine injury and fractures to his skull and ribs. Prosecutors say he was left paralyzed and requires treatment and nursing care to this day.

Javier Fierro-Ayon, Cuevas’ co-worker who was in the back seat of the Corolla, suffered multiple femur fractures that required surgery, as well as four broken ribs.

Benavidez, who was alone in the Camry, also sustained serious injuries in the crash and was pulled out of her car by a bystander. Firefighters who tended to Benavidez “noted the strong odor of alcohol on the defendant,” according to a prosecutor’s trial brief.

Benavidez pleaded guilty in 2006 and in 2012 to misdemeanor DUI counts, for which she received probation; pleaded guilty in 2008 to driving with a suspended license; and was charged in 2013 with DUI and driving with a suspended license, court records show. She was on probation for the 2012 DUI at the time of the fatal 2014 crash.

Deputy District Attorney August Sage said Benavidez was warned of the dangers during her previous DUI convictions, but on the day of the crash “consciously disregarded those warnings that she received.”

“The decision she made took the life of Maria Caballeros that day,” Sage told the jury.

Fierro-Ayon, the prosecution’s first witness, testified that he saw Benavidez’s car enter their lane about five to six seconds prior to the crash. After the impact, he said he saw Cuevas bleeding from the nose and mouth, but didn’t see Caballeros before firefighters pulled him out of the wreckage.

Jurors were shown a photo of Caballeros slumped over in the passenger seat and bleeding from the neck. The cause of her death was blunt force trauma, according to the prosecution.

Benavidez’s attorney, Dennette McIntyre, said her client was likely guilty of drunken driving and perhaps even manslaughter, but rejected the prosecution’s second-degree murder charge, which requires that defendants act with conscious disregard for human life.

McIntyre framed Benavidez’s state of mind as “reckless indifference” and said that other factors brought up by the prosecution, including her two prior convictions, did not mean the prosecution would meet the burden of proof for a murder charge.

“Just because someone has prior convictions does not mean there was conscious disregard for life,” McIntyre said.

Benavidez pleaded guilty on Feb. 2 to a misdemeanor count of driving with a suspended license.