Man sentenced to 10 years in crash that killed son on the way to the circus
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Version 0 of 1. A District man was sentenced to 10 years in prison Monday after his son died in a crash that ejected the 4-year-old from his car seat on their way to the circus. The sentence Charles Antjuan Smith, 33, received was the maximum allowable in the case, which also left the boy’s older sister severely disabled. “The poor choices that he took that night took away my son and my daughter,” Kenita Sullivan, the mother of “Baby Charles,” said during Monday’s sentencing hearing. “My son was everything to me.” A Prince George’s County jury found Smith guilty of manslaughter and other related charges in the May 2013 crash in Cottage City. Smith was on his way to the circus with the two children, driving more than 71 mph along Bladensburg Road. Amid rush hour traffic, he crossed into oncoming traffic before crashing into two other vehicles, prosecutors said. His SUV then jumped a curb and hit utility poles, a tree and a brick wall before coming to a stop, prosecutors said. The force of the impact was so great that his son, Charles Barack Antjuan Sullivan, was thrown from the vehicle. He was not belted in, officials said. Smith’s attorney, Peter Fayne, said his client suffers from drug addiction that began when he started taking pain medication after a car crash in 2011. Fayne asked the judge to place Smith in an intensive drug treatment facility and be given credit for more than 200 days of jail time served as he awaited trial. The pain of his son’s death has already been a punishment for Smith, Fayne said. “He knows through his actions he lost his son,” Fayne said, adding that not a day passes when Smith doesn’t cry because of what happened to his son. Prosecutors had charged Smith with driving under the influence of PCP. But the jury found Smith not guilty of driving under the influence after his attorney argued that the blood sample submitted as evidence was taken from Smith illegally. But while awaiting trial in the death of his son, Smith was charged in April with PCP possession and driving under the influence. “This man, after killing a child, had the audacity to get into his car with PCP on his person,” Assistant State’s Attorney Sam Denai said in arguing for the maximum sentence. When handing down his sentence, Judge Lawrence V. Hill Jr. told Smith he was lucky that no one else was killed that day. The judge said he was concerned that Smith was again arrested on a PCP charge. “Your conduct that day was questionable at best,” Hill said. “If Baby Charles can’t get you to get help, then what can?” |