Star Tribune
Oakdale woman gets nearly 3-year sentence for drunken hit-and-run that killed teen in Bloomington
An Oakdale woman apologized through tears in court Tuesday for driving drunk and killing a 17-year-old boy and injuring his teenage sister who were walking to get candy on a frigid January evening in Bloomington this year.
But Donald E. Gayton Jr.’s family refused to accept the apology from Mikala Jean Ness, 28, who pleaded with a Hennepin County judge to give her probation for the fatal hit-and-run that snuffed out the life of the teen everyone called “Junior.”
In the packed courtroom, Marsha Fugett’s jaw trembled as if she was still standing at the crime scene in the grips of winter on Jan. 27, where she said Ness left her firstborn son on the side of the road “like a piece of trash.”
“There was no call to help my son,” Fugett said. “You killed my son and tried to take my daughter.”
Gayton’s sister, Tamya Lynn Gayton, then 14, survived the crash with serious injuries.
District Judge Julie Allyn said a probationary sentence would not reflect the loss of life and injuries caused to another. Allyn handed down a prison term of nearly three years.
Prosecutors charged Ness with two counts of criminal vehicular homicide — one for being under the influence of alcohol and the other for leaving the scene — and criminal vehicular operation, a gross misdemeanor. Ness pleaded guilty in July.
Assistant Hennepin County Attorney Kali Gardner, said video of the crash shows multiple vehicles slowing down to go around the siblings near E. 78th Street and 12th Avenue S. in Bloomington before Ness arrived.
“[Drivers] see them. They acknowledge them and make sure they stay safe,” she said. “The defendant’s vehicle doesn’t slow down. It’s traveling faster than the other vehicles.”
Video captured the moment Ness struck “Junior,” who is “thrown dozen of feet into the air.”
The crash was shortly before 6 p.m. on a Friday. Ness was arrested by officers more than a mile away after her car went off the road in the 1900 block of Killebrew Drive, police said.
And while Ness said she cannot remember the crash, Gardner said everyone had to watch the tragic video. First responders had to see that crime scene. A nurse driving by stopped to render aid. All of them, Gardner said, will be affected by this for the rest of their lives.
All of it could have been prevented if Ness took an Uber home. Gardner said multiple colleagues tried to get Ness to not drive home that night.
“She had a choice,” Gardner said.
Further, Fugett said that Ness should’ve learned from her mistakes since she was accused of hitting another pedestrian in 2017. Court records show Ness faced a personal injury lawsuit in Blue Earth County when she ran a stop sign and struck a pedestrian crossing Homestead Road in Mankato.
The lawsuit was dismissed three months before the fatal crash in Bloomington.
Ness’ defense attorney Stephen Foertsch said Ness wanted to plead guilty and apologize to the victim’s family at the beginning of the case, but he advised against it.
Foertsch told the judge that Ness has a 2-year-old daughter who would be traumatized from being separated from her mother — a comment that caused Fugett to start shaking and screaming.
He said that Ness has shown remorse and never once complained. And he said Ness doesn’t remember the crash because she was diagnosed with PTSD.
“Her brain is telling her, ‘We cannot let you remember this because you cannot handle it,'” he said. “She is already serving a life sentence.”
He mentioned that Ness had only three drinks and they checked bar surveillance to see if she was drugged because her blood-alcohol content was 0.13% — “that’s not enough for a blackout.” Gardner corrected the defense attorney and said her BAC was actually 0.201%.
Ness, in reading from a lengthy statement in front of a dozen of her loved ones, said she wishes she could take it all back. She said she and her family pray for the victim’s family every day and she said she has “so much undeserved support.”
She knows she will be ashamed when she has to tell her daughter how two kids went to get candy “and one of them was not able to come home because of me,” she said.
She is abstaining from alcohol and wants to be a cautionary tale for others to not drive drunk. She asked the judge to show her mercy because her actions that night are not a reflection of her true character.
Allyn said that while that may be true, she is worried about Ness not being in Alcoholics Anonymous or having a sponsor after she completed virtual treatment.
“No matter how remorseful you are, Donald Jr. is dead,” Allyn said.
Gayton’s mentor, James Austin, who works with the Bloomington nonprofit TreeHouse teen outreach program, said “Junior” was an active member of his program since the sixth grade. He said that he never got into trouble and took care of his community and family.
“Junior was an incredible kid. Legitimately,” Austin said, taking a long pause, “one-of-a-kind. I got the privilege of going on many trips with him and got to see the type of man he was.”
Once in Chicago, he said Gayton began picking up trash on the street.
“I said, ‘Junior, you’re not going to clean Chicago,'” Austin said.
“Every little bit helps,” Gayton told him.
Gayton’s family has since moved to Illinois because Fugett said this place is “too much for us.” His sister Tamya, now 15, said she joined the junior ROTC in honor of her brother.
“I talked him into joining the Army and going to college. And we were going to do it together,” said Tamya Gayton, in her uniform. “I decided to do it for him.”
ZUMBRO RIVER VALLEY, MINN. – From his combine on an October afternoon, harvesting dried-out soybeans the color of dust, Martin Larsen points to a hillside where his ancestors from Scandinavia homesteaded.
History might be happening again on the Larsen farm.
Last year, on this plot of land along the Zumbro River, the 43-year-old farmer from Byron grew oats. Not oats for hogs or cows. But oats for humans. He hauled the oats to a miller across the state line into Iowa. A previous year, Larsen even had a contract with Oatly, the trendy Swedish maker of milk alternatives.
Something of an oat renaissance has been occurring down in the fields west of the Mississippi River. During winters, Larsen — through his job with the Olmsted County Soil and Water Conservation District — evangelized to fellow farmers on the humble small grain.
His friends and neighbors were listening. As of this fall, over 60 farmers, covering 6,000 acres across southern Minnesota, have joined Larsen’s informal coalition to grow food-grade oats. They call themselves the “oat mafia.”
Star of breakfast food, children’s books and, increasingly, those nondairy lattes, oats are easier on the environment, requiring less nitrogen than corn, which means a lot in the karst-rich hill country of southeastern Minnesota, where the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has tasked state officials with cleaning up drinking water.
“Nitrates come from this,” said Larsen, driving his gray Gleaner combine on a patch of soybeans beneath a hillock just beyond the suburban sprawl of northwest Rochester on a recent warm Friday afternoon. “I’m not going to beat around the bush anymore. That’s what the data says.”
But as the oat mafia looks to the future, they’re struggling with a basic marketing question: Who will actually buy these oats they’re growing?
Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan and her daughter were among the throngs Friday as President Joe Biden delivered the apology that many Indigenous Americans thought would never come.
“I think he really said the things that people have been waiting to hear for generations, acknowledged just the horror and trauma of literally having our children stolen from our communities,” said Flanagan, a member of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. “It’s a powerful first step towards healing.”
Hundreds of boarding schools operated in the 19th and 20th centuries, separating Indigenous children from their families and forcing them to assimilate to European ways. Many children were abused, and at least 973 died, according to a report from the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Other Minnesotans reacted similarly to Flanagan, saying they welcomed the apology but that additional action is needed to help Indigenous people move forward.
Anton Treuer, a professor of Ojibwe at Bemidji State University, wrote in a newsletter that the apology was “a welcome first step on the journey to healing.”
“There is no way to truly right historical injustices for the children buried at Carlisle, Haskell, and other schools, but these words set a new tone for the country and will help heal the anguish so many Natives have carried for so long,” Treuer wrote. “It gives me hope that we can come together to reconcile and heal our troubled nation.”
Sen. Mary Kunesh, DFL-New Brighton, the first Indigenous woman to serve in the state Senate, called Biden’s apology encouraging.
“This recognition of past wrongdoings is an important step towards healing relationships between the United States and the sovereign nations affected by these past systems,” Kunesh said in a statement. “This dark period of American history must be remembered and taught.”
“I have done everything in my power to remedy this situation, and it continues to get more and more violent by the day,” Moturi wrote. “There have been numerous times when I’ve seen Sawchak outside and contacted law enforcement, and there was no response. I am not confident in the pursuit of Sawchak given that Sawchak attacked me, MPD officers had John detained, and despite an HRO and multiple warrants — they still let him go.”
On Friday, five City Council members sent a letter to Mayor Jacob Frey and Police Chief Brian O’Hara expressing their “utter horror at MPD’s failure to protect a Minneapolis resident from a clear, persistent and amply reported threat posed by his neighbor.”
Council Members Andrea Jenkins, Elliott Payne, Aisha Chughtai, Jason Chavez and Robin Wonsley went on to allege that police had failed to submit reports to the County Attorney’s Office despite threats being made with weapons, and at times while Sawchak screamed racial slurs. Sawchak is white and Moturi is Black.
The council members also contend in their letter that the MPD told the County Attorney’s Office that police did not intend to execute the warrant for “reasons of officer safety.”
At a Friday afternoon news conference at MPD’s Fifth Precinct, O’Hara said police had been working to arrest Sawchak since at least April, but “no Minneapolis police officers have had in-person contact with that suspect since the victim in this case has been calling us.” The chief pointed out that Sawchak is mentally ill, has guns and refuses to cooperate “in the dozens of times that police officers have responded to the residence.”
O’Hara put aside the option to carry out “a high-risk warrant based on these factors [and] the likelihood of an armed, violent confrontation where we may have to use deadly force with the suspect.” The preference, he said, was to arrest Sawchak outside his home, but “in this case, this suspect is a recluse and does not come out of the house.”
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