18- to 20-year sentence imposed for DUI crash that killed three

CASPER, Wyo. — A Natrona County man was sentenced to 18–20 years in prison on Tuesday for driving drunk and causing a crash that killed three young friends and severely injured a fourth on Interstate 25 just north of Casper in the predawn hours of May 7, 2022.

Steven Gale Spearman, 28, will serve three 18- to 20-year sentences concurrently on three counts of aggravated vehicular homicide. He will also begin serving nine to 10 years for the fourth count of DUI resulting in serious bodily injury.

Spearman was sentenced Tuesday morning in Natrona County District Court before Judge Kerri Johnson.

Spearman was driving north on I-25 with a blood alcohol content at least twice the legal limit when he crashed his Toyota RAV4 into a cable barrier, leaving the vehicle dark and disabled in the northbound lane. Five minutes later, a GMC Yukon with four young friends returning from a party came upon the disabled Toyota and swerved to avoid it.

The Yukon went off the road and rolled several times, ejecting all four occupants, according to the joint Wyoming Highway Patrol and Natrona County Sheriff’s Office investigation.

22-year-old Peterbilt employee Dalton Foos, 19-year-old Midwest High School graduate Justin Robles and 17-year-old Abigail Helms, who had a 1-year-old son, died on the scene.

Tahayla Kohtala, then 17, survived. She said at sentencing that she will need a knee replacement and that she still struggles with the guilt from being the sole survivor.

She recalled being amid the wreckage and Spearman, who had left the scene on foot and returned briefly after the second crash, asking if she was OK. She said she asked him to check on her friends, and then he was gone.

While leaving the crashed Toyota on foot, Spearman had called his ex-girlfriend instead of 911, Chief Deputy District Attorney Blaine Nelson said at sentencing.

A truck driver had also narrowly avoided the disabled RAV4 and called the authorities.

Law enforcement contacted Spearman near the crash scene. He had a blood alcohol content over twice the legal limit two hours after the crash, meaning it was even higher when he got behind the wheel, Nelson said.

“I have to live with what I did,” Spearman said in his brief statement to Judge Johnson. “I do every day.”

Spearmean’s public defender, Dylan Rosalez, said it was not an easy case and the facts were complicated. “It’s difficult to tease out where one crash ends and the other begins,” he said.

Rosalez noted that after Spearman crashed into the cable barrier, the lights on the vehicle were disabled. According to the testimony of NCSO investigator Ken Jividen at the preliminary hearing last year, the hazard light switch on the Toyota had been toggled, but the front-end damage from the crash had apparently left the lights inoperable.  

The vehicle was too damaged too recover onboard data about the first crash, Rosalez said.

The investigation revealed that the victims had been traveling after a party, and alcohol was present in the driver’s system. Rosalez and Nelson cited different lab methodology results and came to different conclusions about whether Foos was at or below the legal limit at the time of the crash. 

“No one deserves what happened up on that hill,” Rosalez said. 

Nelson said that the sum of the circumstances satisfied the legal requirement naming Spearman as the proximate cause of the deaths and injuries.

“There is a chasm in this community caused by this defendant,” Nelson said.

Many of the victims’ family members who spoke asked Johnson to consider the maximum, consecutive sentences.

“We must confront the fact that ours lives will never be whole again every day,” Foos’s mother told the judge. “As a mom, it doesn’t get better.” She said Dalton was the youngest of three siblings and was following the men in his life by becoming a mechanic. She said he blessed everyone around him with “endless laughter and hugs.”

“The day you chose to get behind the wheel drunk, you cut my lifeline short,” Abby’s mother Erin told Spearman. “They say we should forgive for our own selves, to help with the bitterness. … I’m not quite there yet. I was close until I learned you continued to drink and drive.”

She told the judge that Abby was dear to her little brother, who has become detached since her death and insecurely attached to Erin. “He’s afraid the same thing is going to happen to me,” she said.

She said she hoped Spearman sought Christ’s teaching in prison. “I hope you find help with the demons you’re facing.”

Abby’s grandfather Ralph said Abby’s was the only funeral he’s cried at. He said that at the funeral, he met some of Abby’s friends. “One boy said if it wasn’t for Abby, he would have committed suicide,” Ralph said.

Justin’s brother Jason said his own 5-year-old son still wears Justin’s shirt and draws pictures where he himself is gone in an effort to conceptualize reunification. “He wants to see his uncle. … He’s done everything to understand where he went.”

Nelson said that the concurrent sentences in the plea agreement were the result of complex negotiations with Rosalez and that the three deaths had resulted from a singular course of conduct.

Johnson said she would “reluctantly” go along with that agreement.

“The most aggravating thing to this court is that after this, you were arrested two more times for DUI,” Judge Johnson said.

The felony charges for Spearman came down in November 2023, shortly after a DUI charge in Natrona County.

Spearman will get credit for the 481 days served since his arrest on the charges in November 2023.