Driver Sentenced: Sister's death
York Dispatch
4/18/06


Philadelphia -- The sister of a woman killed in a collision with a drunken driver said the loss was doubly painful because it brought back the shock of her mother's death in a crash with a drunken driver 18 years earlier.

Angela Davis said the April 2005 death of her sister, Tracy Imani Davis, 41, hit her like "a bolt of lightning" because she had been in the car when her mother, Julia Davis, was killed, also at age 41, in South Carolina.

"In my mother's crash, I was very much aware of everything going on. I heard the glass. I heard the metal," she told Common Pleas Judge Benjamin Lerner. "It feels like I hear that and feel it now."

Lerner sentenced Miranda Casalena, 24, to four to eight years in a state penitentiary, followed by two years' probation. He exceeded the mandatory three-to-six-year minimum because Casalena had a previous DUI arrest in July 2003, a warning the judge said she failed to heed.

Casalena apologized, saying she was pained by the Davis family's loss, "and it will go on affecting me for the rest of my life."


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