‘How good it feels.’ Bus driver in deadly casino-bound crash leaves California prison

Before Quinton Watts was freed from prison, he talked with a fellow inmate about trees. His friend told him that when he got out of the desolate California State Prison-Solano compound in Vacaville, he should wrap his arms around one.

So a few minutes after arriving at his family’s home in Stockton, Watts stepped out the front door, ambled down a short path and put his hands on the bark of a tree. He wrapped his arms around its trunk. Then he exhaled.

“Something as simple as this means so much to a prisoner,” he said.

After nearly 12 years in custody, Watts was released Wednesday. The subject of a recent Sacramento Bee investigation, Watts was driving with 40 Sacramento-area passengers on the outskirts of Colusa on Oct. 5, 2008 when the bus veered out of control with an apparently unconscious Watts at the wheel. It smashed into a ditch, killing 11 passengers.

Colusa County prosecutors convinced a jury that Watts fell asleep and that he’d been failing to properly tend to his insulin-dependent diabetes in the hours leading up to the wreck.

But after a change in state law about the use of sentencing enhancements and an intervention from the head of California’s prisons, Colusa County Superior Court Judge Jeffrey A. Thompson took nine years off Watts’ 26-year prison term during a Jan. 25 resentencing hearing.

Guards drove him away from the prison nine days later.

Watts’ supporters traveled to Vacaville to pick him up, including two of his three daughters who went in an Uber. COVID-19 restrictions at the prison — which has recorded nearly 260 infections in the past two weeks — meant they couldn’t greet him at the gate like they’d planned, so prison guards instructed supporters to wait at the Vacaville/Fairfield Amtrak station a couple miles down the road.

They’d bring him there about 8:30 a.m., they were told. As the sun rose, Watts’ daughters chatted nervously in the station’s gravel parking lot with Edric Cane, an 85-year-old retired math teacher from France who has been among Watts’ biggest advocates.

Every few seconds, someone’s eyes looked north expecting a bus.

Eric French was among those supporters who gathered at the station. He said he briefly shared a prison dorm with Watts years ago and heard his story during a Bible study session. It stuck with him and helped French get through his own struggles, he said.

He’s the one who told his partner and advocate, Rhonda Glaser, about the case. She helped secure many of Watts’ case files, connected with Cane after seeing his newspaper letter in 2017, and ultimately joined forces fighting for Watts’ release.

“It’s taken a long time,” French said from the station. “But like I was saying on the way here, if I was to die today I’d feel like I served some kind of purpose.”

For months, Glaser has driven her SUV around the Sacramento area with the words “Free Quinton Watts” scrawled in white paint on the back window — using a misspelled first name that has stayed with him for years.

“All he wants to do is be a dad,” Glaser said. “He loves his girls so much.”

At about 9 a.m., with Watts nowhere in sight, Daisha Watts received a call from a guard who was with her father. Despite there being a train station down the road, and despite prison officials knowing Watts’ supporters and news media were waiting, the prison staff had driven him 37 miles away to the station in downtown Sacramento.

“It felt like that was on purpose,” said Daisha Watts, Quinton’s eldest daughter.

The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation said there had been a miscommunication about who Watts’ designated pick-up person was. While Daisha was listed, she didn’t have her license, and the Uber driver didn’t drive onto the prison grounds. Cane, who also was authorized, couldn’t be in the same vehicle as him for health precautions. CDCR also said it’s routine for people to be driven to Sacramento.

So Daisha Watts’ driver then led a caravan of a half-dozen vehicles to Sacramento.

‘I remembered his face’

Dressed in sweatpants, a beanie and surgical mask with gray goatee hairs showing through the side, Watts didn’t look like Daisha had remembered from 12 years ago.

She was seven years old when she last saw him in person. But when she walked into Sacramento Valley Station, she recognized him immediately.

“I remembered his face,” she said.

When Cane arrived a few minutes later the two men bumped elbows. In addition to a wad of cash to help him get on his feet, Cane offered Watts grandfatherly advice: Wear your mask and make sure you get your COVID-19 vaccine as soon as possible, he said repeatedly.

“He’s a lucky man. He’s a good man,” Watts said to Cane’s wife, children and grandchildren.

Edric Cane’s daughter, Maureen, established a GoFundMe page to help Watts. By Thursday, people had donated $4,000.

Cane is consulting with an attorney about what options might still exist for Watts to get financial assistance or help clear up his record. He’s also working to line-up job interviews for Watts, who recently earned his custodial certificate cleaning medical facilities.

And Cane helped arrange a spot in the Stockton residential treatment program, too.

After loading into the Uber two cardboard boxes filled with court files and letters and a bag with a 30-day supply of his medications, Daisha Watts offered her father a cup of IHOP coffee.

He declined.

“Your father has an addictive personality,” he said. A few minutes later, Cane’s grandchildren brought him donuts. He declined those as well — off-limits for people with diabetes, like him.

The Bee in December published an investigation into the 2008 crash and the factors that led to Watts’ original sentence. Despite a documented history of having a seizure disorder, Watts had been cleared to drive by a medical professional. Jurors never learned that the physician assistant had erred in the decision and was later reprimanded by the Medical Board of California.

Prosecutors also leaned on statements from an interview that a medicated Watts, who had been injured in the crash, gave at the hospital only hours after he was taken out of a coma. At trial, there were no Black jurors to hear the case against Watts, who himself is Black. And experts said Watts’ attorney barely mounted a defense, calling just one witness — the paramedic who treated Watts and took him to the hospital.

To this day, many people still remember the California Highway Patrol’s early claim that Watts might’ve been drunk at the time of the crash. He was not.

“That was a terrible accident,” Quinton Watts said at the train station Wednesday. “It should have never happened. I lost my family member as well as they lost theirs.”

“It happened,” he added. “It was a terrible thing. And I just pray that somehow, someway they can forgive me for even being involved in that.”

‘How good it feels to be free’

On the ride back to Stockton, Daisha Watts pointed out landmarks to her father. Where she used to go hang out after school. A lake they can go swimming in. She told him they should plan a trip to the Bay Area to go swimming sometime this summer.

He was trying to take it all in and also tinkered with his new phone. It wouldn’t work, he thought. He’d never seen one quite like it — when he was arrested, flip-phones with T9 text messages were still top-of-the-line.

Daisha showed him how to turn it on. Everyone in the car laughed, she said. Even the driver.

Colene Robinson, Watts’ ex-wife with whom he remains close, said she had planned to make a big breakfast for Watts. But with the mix-up about where to pick him up, it was lunchtime before they arrived. He’d been craving Popeye’s Chicken. That might suffice after all.

“I’m just happy he’s here,” she said.

As children bustled around inside Robinson’s home, and a gray tabby cat named Nala climbed on Watts’ boxes filled with court papers, Quinton returned to the edge of the walkway near the tree he embraced.

He stared into the distance for several minutes. At the cars that zipped around speed bumps in the Stockton neighborhood. At the low-slung houses across the street. At the sky where the morning’s clouds cleared and the sun began to shine again.

It was his first time alone in 12 years.

After a few minutes, he turned and strolled back up the walk, touching his fingers to the leaves of a succulent on the side of the house. Then he paused again.

“How good it feels to be free.”

This story was originally published February 5, 2021 at 5:00 AM.