A woman convicted of a driving under the influence charge for plowing into two Miami Police officers in 2010 has been sentenced to 364 days in jail.
Mary Lindsey was convicted of DUI with serious bodily harm and leaving the scene of an accident for the June 2010 crash that left the two officers seriously injured.
Police said several officers were on the scene of a carjacking when Lindsey failed to stop and drove her 1999 Ford Taurus straight into Miami Police veterans Sgt. Robert Laurenceau and Sgt. Orlando R. Villaverde. The two went flying into the air as Lindsey careened into one of several police cars that were on the scene. The two officers were taken to Ryder Trauma Center for serious injuries.
"I would like to apologize to the officer and his wife,” Lindsey said at her final sentencing Friday.
"He broke six ribs and broke his clavicle,” Laurenceau said of Villaverde. “I broke my neck in two places, broke my scapula and herniated my abdomen.”
Lindsey has been in a treatment facility for the last three months for alcoholism, according to court records. But she had been out of jail for the last three years.
"While I was still in surgery, the defendant was bonding out of jail, she was walking out of jail, while I was in surgery for 8 or 9 hours while the surgeons were trying to just work on me and keep me from being paralyzed for the rest of my life,” Laurenceau said.
On Friday Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Maria Elena Verde ordered Lindsey to serve 364 days in county jail, and not a minimum of nine years in state prison as she could have faced. But her attorneys were asking for even less time.
"What I tried to do was to balance the requests of the two parties and come up with a result that I thought was just,” Verde said.
Laurenceau and Villaverde still suffer from their injuries but continue to serve in the Miami Police Department. But on Friday, Laurenceau said the sentence Lindsey got was acceptable to him.
"We asked that she just get some jail time so that not only could she be punished but also could act as a deterrent for other people,” he said.
Lindsey's family left the courtroom in tears and didn't want to comment.
It’s expected that Lindsey’s attorneys will file a court motion asking the judge to credit her time in the treatment facility towards her sentence of 364 days in jail.
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Photo Credit: NBC 6 South Florida