Plant City woman gets 67 years for 2nd fatal drunk driving crash

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Plant City woman gets 67 years for 2nd fatal drunk driving ******

TAMPA — The first time Jennifer Carvajal

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and killed someone, she got five years in prison. The second time, she got two-thirds of a century.

Hillsborough Circuit Judge G. Gregory Green sentenced Carvajal to 67 years in prison Friday for causing a ****** that killed one of her cousins and seriously injured two other people.

The judge said he struggled to comprehend how the 28-year-old Plant City woman could

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in her life commit the same deadly crime.

“It is almost as if instead of taking every step to avoid putting yourself in that situation again, you took steps to ensure that it happened,” Green told Carvajal. “And that is incomprehensible for this court.”

Carvajal wept and buried her face behind her long ****** locks throughout a four-hour sentencing hearing. She apologized repeatedly to the family of Pedro Carbajal, her cousin who was killed in the ****** off Interstate 4.

“No matter how many sorrys I say to each of you, or even him, I could never forgive myself,” Carvajal said.

The penalty, though short of the life sentence prosecutors sought, was effectively double the 33 years suggested as the bottom range of state guidelines, which the defense favored. It virtually ensures that the earliest Carvajal will leave prison will be when she is in her late 70s.

In her earlier case, and on Friday, too, judges heard testimony about Carvajal’s horrific childhood, which included ******* abuse at the hands of male relatives. The abuse only came to light after Carvajal, at age 9, was diagnosed with a ********* transmitted disease, a social worker testified.

She never received substantial mental health treatment for what was later pegged as post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. She contemplated suicide and was known to harm herself with broken glass. At age 11, she was caught drinking beer in school. She used alcohol, her attorney said, to cope with the lingering pain.

“Jennifer committed these acts because she’s broken,” said Assistant Public Defender Nicole Engebretsen. “She was a broken child that was never healed.”

This time around, though, there was little notion that the horrors of Carvajal’s past should prevent a lengthy prison sentence.

“Two people have lost their lives at the hands of Jennifer Carvajal,” Assistant State Attorney Dawn Hart said in court. “This community is not safe if Miss Carvajal is ever allowed back in society.”

A packed courtroom heard the details of what led up to the ****** from one of the survivors.

Lexcia Gonzalez was Pedro Carbajal’s girlfriend. They had a son named Julian.

On the witness stand, she said she knew Jennifer Carvajal, but not well. She knew she had been to prison.

On the night of April 24, 2021, the three of them attended a family gathering at Pedro’s grandfather’s home in Plant City. Another cousin, Grady Ramirez, was there, too. Late that night, they left in Gonzalez’s car, a silver Hyundai Elantra.

They first went to the Twilight Zone Lounge, a liquor store near the Hillsborough County line. They bought a bottle of Hennessy cognac.

They later went to a Circle K and bought Polar Pops to mix the liquor. They spent the evening drinking, hanging out at a Waffle House, alternating between the Polar Pops and taking swigs directly from the Hennessy bottle.

Late that night, they went to another Circle K to use a restroom. While there, Carvajal asked Gonzalez if she could drive.

“I kind of ignored it the first time,” Gonzalez testified. “She asked again.”

When they left, Gonzalez was the front passenger. The two men sat in the back seat. Carvajal drove.

They headed toward Ybor City. As they moved to get onto Interstate 4, Gonzalez noticed Carvajal had trouble steering. On the highway, she pressed the gas.

Gonzalez watched Carvajal use her phone to take a SnapChat video of the speedometer, showing the car topping 100 mph.

Blue lights came on behind them. Gonzalez told Carvajal to slow down.

“She started panicking,” Gonzalez said. “And saying that she didn’t want to go back to jail.”

Carvajal turned the wheel hard. The car went into a ditch, up an embankment, then over a fence into the parking lot of the Gator Ford auto dealership. It overturned, smashed into a truck and knocked down a concrete pole and a palm tree.

Gonzalez blacked out. When she awoke, she was on the pavement. She felt a burning pain in her body. Both her thighs were broken.

Pedro Carbajal lay on a patch of grass bleeding from his head, his legs pinned beneath the car’s crumpled metal.

Jennifer Carvajal crawled out of the wreckage and went to him. She tried to pull him out and began to cry, Gonzalez said.

She told Gonzalez: Tell them you were driving.

She walked to a fence line that bordered the interstate. A road ranger who’d responded to the ****** and two bystanders encountered her there.

“I’m on papers,” the ranger heard her say. “I have a curfew. I’m not even supposed to be driving.”

She said she needed to leave. Soon, though, Florida Highway Patrol troopers arrived. They noticed bruising on Carvajal’s left shoulder extending down toward her waist. The driver’s seat belt in the car was extended; none of the other belts had been used.

Paramedics gave Carvajal a neck brace and took her in an ambulance to Tampa General Hospital. A Highway Patrol trooper who stood guard in the hospital room said he could smell alcohol every time Carvajal spoke.

An FDLE analyst determined that Carvajal’s blood alcohol content at the time of the ****** was between .10 and .14, above the .08 limit at which the state presumes impairment.

In the four years since the ******, Gonzalez said she went through intensive physical therapy and pain management. She still experiences hip pain and numbness. She has trouble standing and walking up stairs. She becomes nervous when she’s in a car and someone else is driving.

Samantha Carbajal, Pedro’s sister, testified Friday that she saw a series of Snapchat videos the morning after the ****** that Carvajal posted. One showed her posing in a restroom mirror with a caption reading “too busy for anyone.” Another was the speedometer image.

Carvajal phoned her hours after the ******. She told her to tell the others to say she wasn’t the one driving the car.

Her relatives voiced differing sentiments in court.

From Carvajal’s immediate family members came pleas for mercy. She is not evil, they said. She just made terrible mistakes.

From those closest to Pedro came words of enduring pain. They remembered Pedro, a loyal friend, a diligent construction worker, a devoted dad.

“There is a void in my heart,” his mother, Jazmin Lopez Dominguez, wrote in a statement that was read in court. “The decision Jennifer made in that moment caused a lot of pain and suffering in our lives — and Julian who is growing up without knowing his father.”

The scene in court Friday mirrored one a decade ago, when Carvajal first faced a DUI manslaughter charge. The victim was Keith Allen Davis. He was delivering copies of the Tampa Tribune early one morning in February 2014 when Carvajal ran a red light and plowed into his car. She was 16.

“Selfish,” was how Carvajal described her actions back then. It was a word she used again Friday as she stood weeping through a long apology.

“How do I begin to face the ones I love the most?” she said.

She said she imagined the pain Gonzalez had to endure. “Your cries have constantly played in my mind,” she said. She told Ramirez she never meant to hurt him. She said she’d long avoided facing her own reality.

“We all made choices that night,” she said. “I made mine and I have to deal with the consequences.”

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