Something felt off when Audra Gruetzmacher arrived at her emergency room job in Rawlins the dark morning of Dec. 21, 2022.
Two of her supervisors met her in a room, told her there’d been an accident on Interstate 80 that had killed one ambulance worker, Tyeler Harris, and that had injured another ambulance worker: Audra’s daughter Tiffany.
Audra’s husband Mike rushed to the hospital at 5:30 a.m., just in time to meet with an ambulance.
“As they were unloading my daughter, she was covered in blood and screaming, ‘I can’t! I can’t!’” Mike Gruetzmacher recalled during his victim impact statement Friday in Sweetwater County District Court.
He sobbed as he stood a few feet from Saviol Saint Jean, the trucker a jury convicted on Sept. 11 of aggravated vehicular homicide for killing Tyeler, and aggravated assault for hurting Tiffany.
Tiffany veered in and out of consciousness that morning. Doctors asked if she was an organ donor. They wondered aloud if she’d be brain dead.
With her eyes fluttering backward in their sockets, she kept screaming “I cant, I can’t!” Mike recalled.
Mike later learned that in Tiffany’s mind, she was still trapped under a semitruck stuck in the interstate median: the place Saint Jean’s truck had flung her when it crashed through a jackknifed trailer, and into her ambulance.
“Tiffany was desperately trying to reach, and to crawl, to Tyeler,” said Mike, weeping. He said her screams were “a cry of helplessness, because she could not reach Tyeler to get to him.”
Tiffany survived a brain bleed, two skull fractures, brain swelling, a fractured neck and fractures in her back and right hand, according to statements given in court.
She stood in court Friday and said her mental torment is worse than the pain she still endures.
“Why am I still here, alive, and Tyeler is not?” she asked, weeping. “Tyeler had a wife and three beautiful children.”
Some of Tyeler Harris’ family members also spoke to the court, saying they’ve forgiven Saint Jean.
“I did forgive Mr. Saint Jean,” said Tyeler’s grandfather Kirk Clark. “I had to because I can’t carry anger and bitterness in my heart for the rest of my life. The Bible says if we want to be forgiven, we must forgive others.”
Clark and both of Tyeler’s parents described him as a man of sincere Christian faith, a devoted father and family member, a prankster, and a natural caregiver to others.
Dominoes
Facing both statements like these and the facts of Saint Jean’s otherwise hardworking and inoffensive character and history, Sweetwater County District Court Judge Richard Lavery sentenced Saint Jean to between 12 and 14 years in prison, and ordered him to pay standard court costs and fines. For the aggravated assault charge, Lavery gave a sentence of 9-10 years, but that runs concurrently, or simultaneously with the greater sentence.
Saint Jean had been a police officer in Haiti. He and his family decided in 2020 to come to the United States, because his work had grown dangerous for them all, according to Saint Jean’s trial testimony from last September.
He trained in Florida to become a truck driver and was soon driving a route through the Rockies, in the wintertime, Saint Jean’s attorney Joe Hampton emphasized Friday in his own argument.
Hampton said the domino circumstances preceding the crash don’t remove, but should mitigate, Saint Jean’s culpability.
The defense attorney spoke of Saint Jean’s sudden assignment to harsh winter driving despite his lack of experience with it.
Before 4 a.m. the day of the crash, a man driving a 1999, manual-transmission Ford F-150 in two-wheel drive while hauling a trailer westward into the wind on I-80, jackknifed his vehicle.
A trucker hauling double trailers, Andrew Gibbs, saw the double-lane blockage and fled into the left-side median, getting stuck in the snow.
Another trucker who was working for Rey Logistics, Osvaldo Herrera-Pupo, crashed into the truck and trailer, sending the F150 spinning into the median and leaving trailer debris scattered in the left lane, while his truck was high-centered on debris in the right-hand lane.
Tiffany Gruetzmacher, an emergency medical technician for Memorial Hospital of Carbon County, drove to the scene in her ambulance, alongside her fellow EMT Tyeler Harris. She parked westward of the debris in the left lane.
Other cars passed the blockage on the right-side shoulder, according to Gibbs’ trial testimony.
Saint Jean drove into the scene at a still-disputed speed that was somewhere between 47 to 60 mph, according to court testimony.
He switched from the right lane to the left, saw at least one person and the ambulance, braked and hit the ambulance and both EMTs.
A Daughter Out There
Speaking through a Haitian-Creole interpreter, Saint Jean told the court that when he kneels to pray, he’ll always pray for the Gruetzmacher and Harris families.
He asked for the chance to be free and care for his family, and to meet his daughter, who was born after his arrest of two years ago.
“Never did I want to harm anyone. Because I’m someone who loves other people, and always willing to help other people,” said Saint Jean. “Even when I speak to the mother of my children and I hear the voice of my daughter saying ‘Papa, Papa,’ knowing that she’s never met me – what comes to mind is the children of Mr. Harris that are left behind.”
Saint Jean said he lacks words to express the depths of his sorrow.
Fashioning A Sentence…
Saint Jean’s clean history, work ethic and statements of devotion to his family made the case more difficult for Lavery, the judge noted.
“He’s not a bad man. I wish he was. It would be so much easier,” said Lavery. “He’s not a bad man but he did a really bad thing, in a single moment in his life.”
Based on the jury’s convictions, Lavery could have chosen any sentence between probation and 30 years in prison.
Sweetwater County Attorney Danny Erramoupse asked for a sentence of 18-20 years in prison on the aggravated vehicular homicide charge, and eight-to-10-years on the aggravated assault charge. The prosecutor asked that those run consecutively, or back-to-back, for a total of 26 to 30 years in prison.
Hampton suggested probation but officially asked for between three and seven years in prison, followed by three years’ probation with the potential of another two-to-four years in prison should Saint Jean fail probation.
Lavery discussed the four goals of sentencing he’s required to consider: punishment, removal from society, deterrence for both the defendant and the public, and rehabilitation.
Saint Jean carries no substance addiction or similar defects to rehabilitate, the judge noted.
Of all the factors, Lavery dwelled on deterrence the most.
“What I saw, and what I see very day in my life, is that Interstate is a dangerous place and we need to do everything we possibly can to protect our first responders,” said Lavery, “so that something like this doesn’t happen again.”
The judge addressed Tiffany Gruetzmacher directly.
“You are a delightful person. You should not feel bad about anything,” he said. “I can’t make anything better for you. I wish I could. And I say that to the Harris family as well.”
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
