A crash killed a Sacramento veteran. The driver got community service
The driver who fatally struck a grandfather in Midtown in 2024 was sentenced with 180 days of work release and 30 days of community service last week — a typically light sentence in California, where many vehicular manslaughter cases are charged as misdemeanors.
Michelle Silva, the widow of José Luis Silva, 55, said that she was not surprised to hear the judge’s words in court Friday.
The prosecutor and other families whose relatives were killed in car crashes had warned her that a forgiving sentence is the standard criminal court outcome for fatal collisions in California. She was relieved that the judge didn’t grant the driver diversion, an option in the state that could have erased the vehicular manslaughter charge from the driver’s record.
The judge did not, however, order the driver to face any jail time.
“People are not thinking about the victim in any of these cases,” Michelle Silva said. “You kill somebody, and that’s the sentence you get?”
Silva has joined a group of bereaved women — many of whom lost their children to fatal car crashes — who are pushing for enhanced sentencing in fatal vehicle crashes. The Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office told The Sacramento Bee that the maximum sentence a prosecutor could have won in this case was a year in jail.
The majority of fatal crashes do not result in any charges. Among the drivers who are charged, prosecutors often opt for misdemeanor manslaughter when the facts do not appear to meet the high bar for “gross negligence.” Even in cases that appear to show more egregious fault, a sentence can be relatively short. The driver who killed Daniel Lee Jennings Jr., 54, in 2024 was sentenced to a year in jail for a DUI.
Silva knew that the driver who killed her husband would almost certainly receive no jail time. But she thought that was unreasonable, considering that her husband was killed.
A jail sentence, she said, “would certainly make our families feel like the lives that were taken, that were stolen, at least mattered in the court’s eyes.”
In Sacramento, most deadly crashes aren’t followed by an initial arrest. The Bee examined the Sacramento Police Department’s computer-aided dispatch notes for 75 fatal vehicle crashes in 2017 and 2018. Ten of those were single-vehicle crashes in which the drivers killed only themselves. Of the remaining 66 collisions, only 15 led to an arrest.
Silva and her fellow advocates are among the relative minority of families who have had their day in court, but all of them were shocked at the process. One mother, Allison Lyman, previously said that the consequences for killing someone with a car seemed offensively small.
Lyman’s son Connor Lopez, 23, was killed in Elk Grove last year. The driver who hit him has been charged with a misdemeanor and may be eligible for diversion.
At a California Capitol protest last week, Lyman said, “If you want to get away with murder in California, do it with your car.”
This week, Silva put it differently. The U-Haul driver who hit her husband, she said, “gets this light sentence, and our whole family gets a life sentence.”
Killed while headed home from granddaughter
Silva said that the court gave her and her husband’s family an opportunity to recommend a type of community service for the driver. They ultimately settled on asking her to work with Mothers Against Drunk Driving. They asked the judge to make the driver speak publicly about dangerous driving, but she said he declined to make that specific demand. Court records show that the driver will work with MADD.
Silva also said the driver was allowed to delay the start of her sentence — house arrest or ankle monitoring — until June. The records show that she is wrapping up a semester of classes for a chiropractic degree.
The delay seemed to Silva like one more indignity in a terrible series of events that began with her husband’s death in 2024.
“You just gotta hold on to the present,” she said. “And just hold on to family.”
To that end, she particularly relishes time with the granddaughter, Ofelia, who she said her husband, José Luis, was “over the moon” for.
José Luis had gone to babysit Ofelia on the last day of his life, Aug. 25, 2024. Then he stopped at the Sunday farmer’s market on his way home.
Just before noon, he was headed east on J Street when the driver of the U-Haul truck entered the intersection headed north on 24th Street. Video shows that José Luis, a Marine veteran, was traveling on his motorcycle at a reasonable speed that the U-Haul driver did not come to a complete stop, according to the police report. Although José Luis was an experienced rider, investigators determined that based on the distance and the speeds, he could not have avoided the crash.
Silva was shattered. She and José Luis had met later in life. Both of them were parents just shy of 50, and they’d both been married and divorced twice. They had both dealt with life-threatening diseases: Michelle survived breast cancer; José Luis was on the verge of death before he stopped drinking and then in 2017, received a liver transplant.
Each of them felt they had received a second chance at life — one that allowed them to find each other. Silva said they were “instantly best friends.”
“That’s the part that I struggle with: I finally found my person,” she said. “Now what?”
The Bee’s Darrell Smith and Daniel Hunt contributed reporting.
