WOODLAND — Feb. 24, 2016, was Toni Robinson’s shopping day. She’d just left the Target retail center on Second Street in Davis and was driving westbound toward All Things Right & Relevant when a red sport-utility vehicle suddenly appeared in her rear-view mirror.
“They were on my bumper, tailgating me,” Robinson testified Thursday in Yolo Superior Court. “My initial response was, where did he come from?”
“He had to be about this close to me,” Robinson added, holding her hands about a foot apart to demonstrate. “It made me nervous, and it made me angry.”
“He,” authorities say, was Steven Hendrix, who after tailing Robinson would pass her car in the bike lane and nearly sideswipe a bicyclist before broadsiding a Honda Accord whose driver, 71-year-old Cynthia Jonasen of Davis, was making a left turn from Cantrill Drive onto Second Street.
Collision-reconstruction experts and the Ford SUV’s “black box” clocked Hendrix’s speed at about 80 mph upon impact, crushing the driver’s side of Jonasen’s car and the front of the SUV, in which two women and four children between the ages of 6 and 12 were passengers.
Only Jonasen, a former Yolo County probation officer who loved shopping and travel, did not survive the 5:15 p.m. crash.
“You’re going to hear that the collision was so violent that Cynthia Jonasen was internally severed,” Yolo County Deputy District Attorney David Robbins told a jury hearing Hendrix’s trial on charges of second-degree murder, gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, driving under the influence causing injury and child endangerment.
A photograph of Jonasen’s mangled Honda displayed on a large screen elicited sobs from her daughter, Heather Jonasen, in the courtroom audience.
Prosecutors allege that Hendrix’s excessive speed and impairment on marijuana and methamphetamine demonstrated the implied malice necessary to prove murder — that he knew his actions were dangerous “and he had a conscious disregard for other people’s safety,” Robbins said in his opening statement.
Attorneys for the 33-year-old Hendrix attorneys disagree, calling the collision a “tragic car accident” for which their client is remorseful.
“It was a tragedy, but it was not murder,” Deputy Public Defender Stephen Betz said in his opening remarks, admitting that Hendrix was speeding but noted he was trying to get his girlfriend, her sister and their four kids to a local homeless shelter before the rapidly approaching check-in deadline.
“They were living a very chaotic and stressful life,” Betz said. Although Hendrix tested positive for methamphetamine and marijuana following the crash, “what that means is that he had simply used those drugs in the previous days.”
For the most part, both sides agree on the events leading up to the deadly collision.
That morning, Hendrix picked up the women and children from their shelter at University Covenant Church on Mace Boulevard and drove them to West Sacramento to drop the kids off at school.
From there, the adults went to a rented storage locker where the women kept their property, and the three shared a marijuana blunt. They picked up the children from school around 2:30 and parked at a local library.
While the women and kids went inside, Hendrix stayed behind, meeting up with two friends for about two hours.
“You’re going to hear that Hendrix appeared different” when he returned, Robbins told the jury. By then it was nearly 5 p.m., a half-hour from when shelter organizers in Davis would start turning latecomers away.
As Hendrix sped westbound on Second Street, one of the children in the SUV told him to slow down, and “you’re going to hear that he shrugged his shoulders” in response, Robbins said. Police, he added, will testify that Hendrix appeared impaired at the crash scene and the SUV reeked of marijuana.
Betz, meanwhile, said there’s no evidence proving Hendrix ingested drugs other than the pot he smoked more than five hours before the collision. Following the impact, Hendrix tried to check on Jonasen’s well-being but was held back by bystanders who observed she had already passed away.
“When he figured out what had happened, he became extremely distraught,” Betz said.
The trial’s first witness Thursday was Blaise Camp, the bicyclist Hendrix nearly hit after passing Robinson’s car.
Camp, a computer programmer, testified he had just left work and was cycling westbound on Second Street near Peña Drive when a red SUV came into his peripheral view.
“My impression was that it was in the bicycle lane,” said Camp, who estimated the vehicle came within two feet of him and was traveling roughly 70 mph — well above the posted 45-mph speed limit.
He recalled seeing the SUV pass a second vehicle in the middle turn lane at about the same time a silver sedan pulled out onto Second Street from Cantrill Drive.
“I didn’t see it slow down,” Camp said of the SUV. “Immediately after that, I saw an explosion of fluid and debris in the air, basically.”
Both Camp and Robinson testified they arrived at the crash scene to witness Hendrix being held back from Jonasen’s vehicle, which had come to rest near the train tracks south of Second Street.
“He was upset,” said Robinson, who also observed several children on the north sidewalk. One, a boy, was bleeding from his head, while a girl appeared to be “hysterical.”
“Oh my God — we almost died,” the girl said, according to Robinson. “She was saying it over and over and over again.”
Testimony resumes today in Judge Paul Richardson’s courtroom.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene