You won’t believe this, I didn’t the first time I read it. Elizabeth Shelton, 21, was convicted last year of intoxication manslaughter. She was speeding down the Southwest Freeway in Houston in October of 2007, lost control of her car and slammed into the back of a commercial truck, killing her boyfriend, Matthew McNiece. When tested, Shelton’s blood alcohol level was over three times the legal limit.
Even though the statute for intoxication manslaughter requires a two-to-twenty year sentence, the jury in the case only sentenced Shelton to 8 years’ probation, a $10,000 fine, and 120 days in jail.
Having killed her boyfriend through her drunken recklessness, you might think this daughter of a state district judge would think long and hard about her responsibility, especially given the jury’s lenient sentence – a real break she plainly did not deserve.
Nope.
This prize of a person filed suit against the truck driver she hit.
Shelton thinks she is entitled to “medical care and expenses, payment for pain and suffering, mental anguish, $20,000 in property damage to the car, plus attorney’s fees.”
I honestly cannot, in polite company, use the sort of words necessary to describe what I think of someone who would blame one of her victims for her own selfish and deadly behavior. ‘Stone heart’ is as close as I can do here.
