A vehicular manslaughter case has been slowly moving forward in the Albemarle County court system.
Nelson County resident Richard King has seen three slated court dates come and go with no resolution. The now-33-year-old King was charged for a Rio Road crash last summer that hit two other vehicles and claimed the life of his passenger, 32-year-old Kenneth Choloski II.
"Video footage obtained from the Exxon gas station less than one mile prior to the crash scene showed King’s vehicle traveling at a higher rate than all other vehicles near him," investigator John VanWitzenburg asserted in a criminal complaint.
In the Aug. 8 wreck, King’s Honda Civic struck a sport utility vehicle which had stopped for a traffic signal at Hillsdale Drive and then careened into another sport utility vehicle. Neither King nor his passenger was restrained by seat belts, and Choloski was pronounced dead at the scene.
Choloski, who lived in Earlysville, was a graduate of Western Albemarle High School who enjoyed outdoor sports, including paintball, fishing, dirt biking and ATV riding, according to his mother.
"He was an outgoing person," mother Patricia Choloski-Burley told The Daily Progress. "He liked to joke a lot."
He didn’t marry or have children, but Choloski held a particular fondness for his two dogs, Chance and Teva, said his mother. She said he often worked as a plumber with his father and would make rap music when he found the time.
She said her son once traveled to Florida for a paintball competition and recently took home a trophy from a Central Virginia dirt bike competition.
"When he was doing music or sports, those were his happiest times," said Choloski-Burley.
Choloski’s mother’s said his death has devastated those who were close to him.
"It’s hard to deal with. It’s really hard," she said. "I just wish he didn’t get in that car that day."
The investigator noted that two witnesses asserted that King was driving too fast for the conditions on the road; it was a cloudy and rainy day. But in his probe of the wrecked Civic, the investigator found something else.
"Several open containers of alcohol were found inside the vehicle, along with a glass smoking device with a burnt substance in the end of it," VanWitzenburg wrote.
VanWitzenburg asserted that the substance was cannabis, and received some confirmation after getting a search warrant for King’s blood test results at University of Virginia Medical Center in Charlottesville.
King also tested positive for alcohol, but at a 0.05%-0.06% blood concentration, his alcohol level was not sufficiently high enough to be illegal. The cannabis testing, however, told a different story.
King allegedly said at the hospital that he had smoked 1.5 grams of cannabis. Unlike Virginia, which has not set an intoxication level for THC, the intoxicating compound in cannabis, several states have criminalized a concentration above 5 nanograms per milliliter of blood. King’s concentration, according to VanWitzenburg, was more than 1,000 nanograms.
At the time of the crash, just before 6:22 p.m. Aug. 8, the remnants of Hurricane Debby were moving through the Charlottesville area with low clouds, heavy winds and heavy rain.
King seemed to have an incomplete memory of that summer evening’s events.
"He was unaware of the location of the crash and stated he does not remember what happened during the crash, only that it was raining hard enough that he could not see out of windshield," wrote VanWitzenburg.
At the time of his arrest, King listed his employment with an electric company. He was reported to be seriously injured in the crash and has been coming to court hearings steadying himself with a walking cane.
Initially held without bail, King was subsequently granted the right to "home electronic incarceration," which allowed him to return, about a month after the crash, to his residence in the Nelson County community of Nellysford. His lawyer is Lloyd Snook, also a city councilor in Charlottesville, who declined a Daily Progress request for comment.
At one point, on Jan. 8, Snook told the court that he hoped to hire a private contractor to do what the police could not: download data from a "black box" on King’s vehicle to determine his speed.
The people in the other vehicles were originally described as having sustained only minor injuries. However, two months after the crash, after learning of the injuries sustained by Dallas White, a man driving a Toyota Rav4, the investigating officer obtained a second warrant against King on a permanent maiming charge.
White reportedly sustained two spinal fractures, nine broken ribs, two vertebral compression deformities, a pulmonary contusion and a kidney lesion. And, according to VanWitzenburg, he faces the prospect of "long-term impairment."
White told the officer that he could see the speeding Civic approaching and attempted to brace himself and his passenger for impact.
This is not the first time King has drawn scrutiny for his driving.
Court records show that he has a pair of following-too-closely convictions in Albemarle County, and he was convicted of reckless driving in Nelson in 2020. In two of those cases, King was convicted in absentia. His criminal record also shows Nelson County convictions for petty larceny and forging bank notes.
A vehicular manslaughter conviction is punished by a term from one to 20 years. A maiming conviction carries a term from two to 10 years. King’s next hearing is slated for April 24 in Albemarle County General District Court.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com