Testimony Drawing to Close

Newport — The defense attorney for a 23-year-old Sharon woman accused of driving drunk and causing a fatal crash in 2017 on Route 10 in Croydon on Monday continued to press the lead State Police investigator on his conclusions about the case.

Attorney James Valente asked Detective Michael McLaughlin, who was on the stand for a third day, why he believed Michelle Fenimore had received a text shortly before the crash instead of having been the sender.

Monday was the sixth day of Kristin Lake’s negligent homicide trial, and throughout, Valente had contended that Fenimore may have been using her phone just before the crash, causing her to cross over into Lake’s travel lane on the night of Sept. 22, 2017.

Police and prosecutors have alleged Lake was impaired, fell asleep and crossed into Fenimore’s lane, causing the crash that killed Fenimore and her 18-year-old passenger, Nicholas Carpenter. Lake has pleaded not guilty to negligent homicide — DUI charges in the trial, which is expected to wrap up today.

McLaughlin testified saw an unopened text message from Fenimore’s fiance, Trever Morse, on Fenimore’s iPhone screen on the night of the crash. The text, which came through at 11:05 p.m., roughly 10 minutes before the call for the crash came into dispatch, read: “Are you home yet?” according to McLaughlin.

Valente displayed Verizon cellphone records on a projector inside the Sullivan Superior courtroom, and he and McLaughlin both agreed that the formatting of the records made them difficult to read. Valente claimed it was actually Fenimore had sent the text message to Morse. Morse and Carpenter were brother. Any ambiguity could have been cleared up, Valente said, if McLaughlin had sent the phone to the state forensics laboratory for further examination.

“We can’t resolve whether Ms. Fenimore was on her phone at the time of the accident — doing something other than calling or texting — because you did not send her phone to the lab,” Valente said.

McLaughlin didn’t need to send it to the lab because he “was able to see that she had an unread text message from Trevor,” among other reasons, McLaughlin said.

Later in his cross-examination of McLaughlin, Valente focused on the “scrub marks,” or skid-type marks, that McLaughlin said started in the southbound travel lane.

The marks were “the most important part” of McLaughlin’s crash analysis, according to Valente, because they are where McLaughlin believes the cars first came in contact and are the anchor point he used to recreate the crash using mathematical equations.

The marks didn’t show up well in photographs and McLaughlin never clearly documented them in his reconstruction, Valente contends. Valente also questioned why the debris and fluids from the vehicles were mostly in the northbound lane if the crash occurred in the southbound lane; Fenimore was traveling south and Lake was traveling north at the time of the crash.

McLaughlin testified the marks were documented, and the debris and fluids moved with the speed of the crash, sending most of them flying into the northbound lane. The two cars came to rest facing east in the northbound lane.

On the state’s redirect, Sullivan County Attorney Marc Hathaway focused on casting doubt on defense-hired expert’s Steven Benanti’s conclusion that it was Fenimore whow had been responsible for the crash.

McLaughlin testified that Benanti didn’t provide any mathematical calculations or diagrams to support his theory of what happened.

McLaughlin said Benanti only based his opinion off of the “gouge marks” in Lake’s travel lane, which McLaughlin said don’t depict where the cars first collided but rather where “maximum engagement,” or the most force in the crash, occurred.

McLaughlin testified for about 12 hours over the course of three days. The defense and prosecution had anticipated giving closing arguments on Monday, but they were put off to today.

Closing arguments are expected this morning, Judge Brian Tucker told jurors before they left.

Jordan Cuddemi can be reached at jcuddemi@vnews.com or 603-727-3248.

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