Fate of driver who killed Pierce County girl is in hands of jury. Did he act recklessly?
No one disputes that Terry Kohl ran over 12-year-old Immaculee Goldade and struck her friend near Parkland last year, killing Goldade and badly injuring the other girl.
Kohl admitted to being behind the wheel of the truck, Goldade’s blood was found on the vehicle’s underside and her shoes were left strewn among pieces of the GMC flatbed left behind. While a photograph of the girl was projected onto a screen in an eighth-floor courtroom of the County-City building Wednesday, prosecutors and defense attorneys during closing arguments in Kohl’s trial agreed the case is nothing short of a tragedy. The picture showed Goldade smiling in white sneakers while she sat beneath a tree.
What is in dispute is whether Kohl acted recklessly or simply disregarded the safety of others. According to the state’s sentencing guidelines, the distinction could more than double the length of the defendant’s sentence if a jury convicts him.
Hours before the deadly collision on Jan. 15, 2022, Kohl and an accomplice burglarized a landscaping business in Edgewood, where prosecutors say Kohl stole a flatbed GMC C4500 along with yard equipment. Gas station surveillance footage then captured him buying snacks while wearing a reflective safety vest. GPS data for the truck shows he idled it in a cul-de-sac for about an hour, then continued to drive.
That morning, Goldade was on a walk in her neighborhood with her best friend, Kathleen Olson. Prosecutors said a witness saw the truck Kohl was driving cross into oncoming traffic four times before it went off 104th Street East at about 10:30 a.m. and hit the girls at 39 mph. Olson glanced off the side when she was hit, and Goldade went under.
“Immaculee died on Jan. 15 of 2022 because of selfishness and recklessness and for no reason,” deputy prosecuting attorney Elizabeth Dasse told the jury.
Kohl’s lawyers from the Department of Assigned Counsel don’t contest that he hit the girls, but they argued that when he drove away, he didn’t know he’d been in a collision. Attorney Sarah Tofflemire asked the jury to find him guilty of vehicular homicide and vehicular assault with disregard for the safety of others. They went into deliberations Thursday morning.
“When we look at what we know Mr. Kohl admitted, he admits to the burglary, he admits to being in the gas station, he admits to driving the vehicle, he admits to the renting of the storage unit he used,” Tofflemire said. “We don’t have any statement that we know about about the accident itself.”
Jurors will also determine whether Kohl knew or should have known the victims were particularly vulnerable or incapable of resistance — aggravating factors that could lengthen his sentence if convicted. His other charges must also be decided: failure to remain at an accident resulting in death, second-degree burglary, two counts of unlawful possession of a stolen vehicle, first-degree unlawful possession of a firearm and first-degree possessing stolen property.
The man who helped Kohl break into the landscaping company where the GMC flatbed was taken, J. Michael Hutchins, has already been sentenced to five years, eight months in prison. He pleaded guilty in August 2022 to second-degree burglary, first-degree theft and theft of a motor vehicle. He also pleaded guilty to vehicular assault for injuring his girlfriend when he fled from deputies and wrecked his vehicle while authorities moved to arrest him.
Kohl, 33, faces significant prison time if he is convicted. He was previously sentenced to prison in 2017 for breaking into a home to steal a revolver and an SUV, then using them in a home-invasion robbery. He also has a pending 2020 case for unlawful possession of a firearm after a a 12-gauge shotgun, meth pipe and bottle of whiskey were allegedly found in his garage.
His offender score was four when he was convicted in 2017, so according to the state’s sentencing guidelines, he could face at least nine to 12 years in prison if he’s convicted of vehicular homicide in a reckless manner. His other charges and the aggravating factors of his vehicular homicide and vehicular assault charges could lead to more time.
Prosecutors’ closing arguments focused on giving jurors a clear timeline of events. In Dasse’s telling, it begins at 6:40 a.m. on Jan. 15 at Amazing Landscapes, where a GPS system installed in a truck showed it leaving the business minutes later.
Dasse described how cell phone data for Kohl and Hutchins showed they were also at the landscaping company. Over the next few hours, the GPS shows the truck stop at several places, including a gas station where surveillance footage shows Kohl is the only person in the truck. Dasse said phone data shows that at this point, Hutchins is no longer with him in a separate vehicle.
For several hours, the truck doesn’t go anywhere, and it’s unclear what Kohl is doing until just before 10 a.m., when a man came across it stopped in the middle of the road. Dasse said the man testified that he got out of his vehicle, went up to the truck and pounded on the window. Inside was a sleeping man wearing a safety vest. He woke up and kept driving.
Prosecutors originally charged Kohl with DUI vehicular homicide, alleging that he admitted to a Sheriff’s Department detective that he used methamphetamine at a local casino sometime before the collision. He was later re-arraigned to remove that aspect of the charge, and his possible drug use didn’t come up during closing arguments.
Still, Dasse questioned what state Kohl must have been in to be passed out behind the wheel in the middle of the road.
“That pounding on the window is Terry Kohl’s literal wake-up call,” Dasse told the jury. “What state are you in when you wake up to somebody pounding on the window and decide I better just keep driving?”
The defense, on the other hand, pointed to this interaction between Kohl and the bystander as evidence that the defendant’s actions constituted disregard for the safety of others, but not recklessness. Tofflemire said the only thing the bystander did afterward was drive home and watch Kohl drive by. She said his reaction — “I guess it’s OK,” is a disregard for the safety of others.
“This is something more than I changed the dial on the radio or I looked at a text message or I yelled at the kids in the back of the car,” Tofflemire told the jury. “That’s an ordinary deviation from the standard of care. We all know we’re not supposed to, but we’ve all done that. This is something worse than that, but I think the reaction of that ordinary citizen tells you that it’s not quite to the level of rash or heedless manner with indifference to consequences.”
Tofflemire also brought up several facts of the collision as evidence that Kohl didn’t know what was happening when he hit the girls. She said based on where they were hit, with Olson closest to the ditch and Goldade closest to the road, the truck must not have been all the way off the road. There’s also no evidence that Kohl hit the brakes while the incident occurred.
During rebuttal argument, the state was in disbelief that Kohl wouldn’t have known he was in a wreck.
“How? How would you not know?” Dasse said. “There’s pieces of the van everywhere. You drove off into a ditch. You had to go like a couple hundred feet just to over-correct. How? There are people pulling over right behind you in your rearview mirror, if you’re looking at anything at all, how would you not know?”
This story was originally published July 27, 2023 at 2:36 PM.
