Manslaughter case dismissed

SANDPOINT — The state is discontinuing its prosecution of a motorist accused of causing a deadly crash on U.S. Highway 95 in Cocolalla last year.

Zachary Brandon Henager was charged with vehicular manslaughter at the misdemeanor level following the Jan. 21, 2012, crash. James Mady, 49, of Creswell, Ore., was fatally injured in the chain-reaction pileup.

Idaho State Police said Henager was southbound in the Cocolalla Flats area when he lost control of his Mazda MX-6 and crossed into the northbound lanes. Henager crashed head-on into a tractor-trailer, which then lost control and slammed into a southbound semi driven by Mady.

Two other tractor-trailers and another passenger vehicle were involved in the series of crashes, but did not contribute to Mady’s death.

Henager, a 25-year-old who lists addresses in Sandpoint and Moody, Texas, was accused of driving imprudently on the snow-covered highway, either by traveling too fast for conditions, driving inattentively or by having dangerously worn tires.

Henager pleaded not guilty, which set the stage for a two-day trial in Bonner County Magistrate Court in November.

Deputy Prosecutor Roger Hanlon, however, moved to dismiss the charge against Henager based upon a review of the defense’s crash reconstruction report, according to court documents.

Judge Debra Heise granted the motion during a pretrial hearing in the case on Friday.

The defense-commissioned reconstruction analysis, which was conducted by Confidential Investigations in Hayden, suggests there is ample reasonable doubt that Henager was at fault for the crash.

Crash reconstructionist Ray Urbano concluded the state police investigation was incomplete and that poor winter highway maintenance and hydroplaning factored into the pileup.

Urbano notes that the significance of physical evidence collected at the scene was unclear because there was no diagram placing the items in context. Additionally, there was no inspection of Henager’s coupe, which wasn’t impounded and could not be found after the fact.

The vehicle’s service records also were not examined and Urbano contended that speed calculations were not derived from evidence at the scene, leading to his conclusion that excessive speed was only an assumption.

Moreover, Urbano further concluded that eyewitness accounts of Henager’s Mazda immediately before it went out of control suggest that it was hydroplaning, which occurs when a layer of water builds up between the wheels and the road surface, causing a loss of traction that prevents the vehicle from responding to its controls.

“The front tires lifted from the wedge of water built up in front of them. The trailing or remaining slush on the road then affected the rear tires in the same manner and caused them to also lift from the road surface,” Urbano wrote.