A Woodland resident accused of hit-and-run and felony manslaughter while causing two collisions on February 1 pleaded not guilty to the charges on February 6 in Yolo Superior Court. An elderly Vacaville woman was fatally injured in the first of the two crashes.
At his arraignment, Armando Arias Gonzalez, 39, stated his name after the order to do so by Yolo Court Commissioner Janene Beronio was translated into Spanish for him by an interpreter.
Gonzalez is accused of ramming the Chevy Malibu 85-year-old Ruth Morales of Vacaville drove along East Covell Boulevard near Pole Line Road at about 2 pm on Feb. 1. Gonzalez forced Morales’s Chevy off the boulevard with his Toyota Corolla and she crashed into a roadside tree. Authorities said Morales had celebrated her 85th birthday just the day before. She died of her injuries hours after the accident at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento.
The second collision forced a car into the intersection at Pole Line Road.
Gonzalez did not stop to aid Morales after the accident, but proceeded along Covell Boulevard. Minutes later, at the intersection of Pole Line Road, he rear-ended a Jeep the driver of which had stopped for a red light. Gonzalez hit the Jeep, driven by Julie Mohr, so hard the impact forced it into the usually busy intersection. Luckily the lights had recently turned green and Pole Line Road had emptied of traffic. “Otherwise, we could easily have been clipped by the cross traffic,” Mohr told a Davis Enterprise reporter. Neither Mohr nor her daughter Alexa Rae, who rode in the Jeep’s front passenger seat, was seriously injured in the crash.
Beronio scheduled a preliminary hearing in the case for March 7 in Judge Paul Richardson’s courtroom.
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