Agony Of Crash Recalled Eye-Witnesses To Deadly Accident Give Emotional Testimony

Eric Ginn was driving home one evening five months ago when he saw something in his rearview mirror that was about to change his life.

Pulling out on Mission Avenue, Ginn could see a pickup truck behind him barreling ahead, not slowing for the red light in front of them both.

“I knew right away that something awful was going to happen,” Ginn testified in Spokane Superior Court on Friday.

Within minutes, the 34-year-old Ginn ran from his car to help one of two women who died that night, victims of pickup driver James Barstad, on trial for two counts of first-degree murder.

The woman Ginn rushed to help was 26-year-old Karen Sederholm, out for a night of fun with two visiting friends.

Ginn, one of 18 witnesses to testify Friday, said he realized there was little to do except comfort Sederholm.

“I held her hand and squeezed it, and she seemed to squeeze back twice,” he said.

The woman never regained consciousness. Blood began emerging from her ears, the result of brain and chest injuries caused from the impact of Barstad’s truck when it landed on top of her Honda, police reported.

“That was the worst, feeling totally helpless,” Ginn said after testifying.

Ginn’s testimony was the most emotional in a day filled with eyewitness accounts of the May 25 accident at the intersection of Mission and Hamilton.

Barstad, 30, is also accused of first degree murder in the death of 14-year-old Julie Allen, a passenger in her mother’s car.

Witnesses said Barstad ran the red light at nearly 50 miles per hour, slamming into three other vehicles and causing five other injuries.

A commercial truck driver at the time, Ginn no longer works behind the wheel. Instead, he’s employed in a motorcycle shop, because he says he can’t imagine confronting the same type of accident again.

“There isn’t a day I don’t think about what happened,” he said.

“Life’s too precious. Holding that girl’s hand … that was someone’s life, and that guy took it for no apparent reason,” Ginn said.

The trial is the first in Washington in which a driver in a fatal accident has been charged with first degree murder instead of vehicular homicide, said Spokane County Prosecutor Jim Sweetser.

During opening statements, Public Defender Al Rossi told the jury Barstad does not deny he drank excessively and killed the two women.

The jury must decide if Barstad deserves a life sentence for first-degree murder or 20 to 30 years in prison, if convicted, for vehicular homicide.

To convict Barstad of murder, the jury must decide that he acted “with extreme indifference to human life.”

It took four days to find jurors who said they were not affected or prejudiced by the heavy publicity the accident has received.

Deputy Prosecutor Larry Steinmetz will continue with prosecution witnesses on Monday and Tuesday. Rossi expects to present his witnesses starting Wednesday. He plans to call Barstad to the stand in his own defense.

Rossi will tell the jury that Barstad drank so much before the accident that he was oblivious to the risks he was causing others. The trial in Judge Thomas Merryman’s court is expected to last through next week.

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