WOODLAND — “I felt like something was going to go wrong.”
Erica Shoate said that’s what flashed through mind seconds before her family’s vehicle was involved in a fatal collision on Second Street in Davis, her aunt’s boyfriend Steven Hendrix behind the wheel.
Steven Hendrix reacts last Thursday at his trial for killing a Davis woman in a Second Street crash. Testimony continues this week. Sue Cockrell/Enterprise photo
“We were going way faster than the other cars,” Erica testified in Yolo Superior Court on Tuesday about the moments leading up to the Feb. 24, 2016, crash. “I said, ‘Hey, can you please slow down?’ He just shrugged his shoulders and kept on going anyway.”
Erica said Hendrix even sped up a notch, passing at least one car and nearly hitting a bicyclist just as another vehicle, a silver sedan driven by 71-year-old Cynthia Jonasen of Davis, pulled out from Cantrill Drive onto Second Street.
“After that we crashed,” said Erica, whose mother, aunt and three cousins also were among Hendrix’s passengers in their Ford SUV. She recalled that her legs became pinned underneath the front passenger seat that broke from the crash impact, while her 6-year-old cousin flew from his third-row seat into the center console area.
All survived with only minor injuries, even though some weren’t wearing seatbelts. But Jonasen, whose car Hendrix allegedly broadsided at nearly 80 mph, died at the scene.
Yolo County prosecutors have charged Hendrix, 33, with second-degree murder, gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, driving under the influence with injury and child endangerment. They allege that he acted with conscious disregard for others’ safety by driving recklessly and while under the influence of marijuana and methamphetamine.
Hendrix’s attorneys have denied he was high at the time of the crash, disputing allegations of meth use that day and insisting his marijuana use occurred some five hours earlier. Any signs of impairment he displayed at the scene, they say, was due to disorientation from the collision.
His trial, which began last week, continued Tuesday with testimony from all four children who were in the car that February evening, their ages ranging from 6 to 12.
Erica, now 13, testified that Hendrix had picked up her mother, aunt and cousins at a Davis homeless shelter that morning and dropped the children off at their West Sacramento school. The adults retrieved the children several hours later, and Hendrix dropped the women and children off at a nearby library.
“He stayed in the car” while the others went inside, Erica recalled. “He was there for a few minutes, and then he left with two friends” whom she identified as Nick and Tiffany, both friends of her aunt.
Her cousin, Hosea Peppars, said Hendrix seemed different when he returned.
“He looked like he was tired, because his eyes were red,” remembered Hosea, 11, although his sister, Aaliyah Peppars, recalled that “he seemed OK.”
When they got on the freeway for the drive back to Davis, however, Hendrix “was kind of speeding a little,” Aaliyah said. Running late for the homeless shelter check-in deadline, he swerved around two other cars on Second Street, maneuvers that the 13-year-old said frightened her.
“I had a feeling we were going to crash,” she said.
— Reach Lauren Keene at lkeene@davisenterprise.net or 530-747-8048. Follow her on Twitter at @laurenkeene