MONROE — After a three-day trial last week, 12 jurors unanimously found Monroe man Steven Moon guilty of homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle for the July 2018 accident that killed his friend.
Moon, 56, is scheduled to be sentenced Jan. 10 before Green County Circuit Court Judge Thomas Vale.
The jury deliberated about three hours Thursday, Nov. 7, before finding him guilty of homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle and homicide by use of a vehicle with a prohibited blood-alcohol concentration, both Class D felonies. Each count carries a maximum sentence of 25 years in prison.
The decision came after three days of testimony from witnesses, including several accident reconstruction experts, a forensic pathologist and Moon himself.
Moon testified that his friend and passenger, 55-year-old David Scott Eldred, reached over and grabbed the steering wheel from him in an apparent suicide attempt to crash the vehicle in the early morning hours of July 27, 2018.
“He just told me he didn’t want to be around anymore. ... I was fighting him off. I’m fighting him and trying to see the road,” Moon said. The last thing Moon said he remembered was the sound of grass underneath his 1993 Dodge Dakota as it entered the ditch off Wisconsin 11/81 near County S in Juda.
A test of Moon’s blood drawn almost three hours after the accident showed he had a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.225%, nearly three times the legal limit for driving.
Moon’s defense was that Eldred died because he grabbed the steering wheel and caused the crash, regardless of Moon’s intoxication or blood-alcohol level.
But the evidence, as presented by accident reconstruction experts and others, does not support Moon’s story.
Tire marks from Moon’s pickup truck revealed the accident started when the vehicle drifted off the road to the right, as opposed to a sudden jerk of the steering wheel that would be in keeping with Moon’s narrative, according to Michael Marquardt, an accident reconstructionist with the Wisconsin State Patrol.
“He drove straight off the road,” Marquardt said. It’s a “very common scenario we see on the interstate” and indicative of inattentive driving or the driver falling asleep behind the wheel.
The tire marks show the steering was then jerked to the left to get the truck back on the road. But, at an estimated speed of 66-72 mph, the truck started sliding sideways, then tripped and rolled several times before landing in the ditch facing the way it came.
The accident reconstruction found Eldred was partially ejected and then catapulted from the truck, landing 72 feet away. A forensic pathologist later testified that Eldred died of internal injuries from hitting the ground, including spinal fractures and a torn aorta that caused him to pass out “instantly.”
“These are very violent crashes,” Marquardt said.
While Marquardt and two of his fellow state troopers testified, Assistant District Attorney Laura Kohl showed the jury photos: tire scuff marks on the road, ditch grass embedded in the truck’s fender, Eldred lying on the autopsy table.
According to reports from the Green County Sheriff’s Office, a man on his way to work at the nearby Grande Cheese factory called 911 at 3:51 a.m. that morning to report the accident. Deputies arrived within minutes and found the pickup in the ditch, unoccupied and still warm to the touch. Cans of beer, a kayak and camping and fishing supplies were scattered across the ditch and the truck itself “emitted a noticeable odor of intoxicants,” a detective noted.
Officers found Moon lying outside the truck, conscious but slurring his words, and reported that he gave conflicting stories of what happened.
In his testimony at trial, Moon described the 12 hours before the crash. It was a Friday, and he was on vacation. He had a camping and fishing trip planned for the weekend at the Sweet Minihaha Campground near Brodhead.
He met up with Eldred, a friend he’s known over 20 years, in the late morning with plans to go fishing.
But first, “we decided to get something to eat, so we went down to Friendly’s to get pizza,” Moon said.
Eldred was expecting money from the bar owner and wanted to wait there until he got paid, Moon said. Besides a trip mid-afternoon to pick up supplies from Walmart, Moon said he waited at the bar with Eldred.
But Moon said the bar owner never showed up, so he and Eldred ended up spending the rest of the night at Friendly’s, shooting pool and socializing. They finally left the bar at about 2 a.m. with the intention of heading to the campsite.
On their way, they stopped at the Monroe Kwik Trip, where Moon picked up some bread and ground chuck beef to eat at the campsite.
Kwik Trip employees later told police Moon smelled of alcohol and was so drunk he fell down in the store and missed his pocket with the change a cashier handed him.
Moon testified that his fall in the store wasn’t due to intoxication but tripping on some unexpected obstacles in the aisle. He also said the toll of physical labor on his hands over the years has made it hard for him to hold onto small objects like change.
Under cross examination, he denied being “extremely drunk” and said that while he had not been keeping track of how many beers he drank that day, he considered it just “social” drinking.
He said his memory of Eldred grabbing the steering wheel came to him three days later, as he recovered in a hospital. He said he was in “excruciating” pain from his injuries, which included a concussion and large gash to his head that had to be stapled shut.
When Kohl asked him if he was trying to sort through what happened during the crash, he responded, “Every day.”
After Moon’s testimony, Kohl called to the stand a rebuttal witness, Eldred’s eldest sister, Debora Burkheimer.
The weekend of the crash, her youngest brother had an event to look forward to: every year on the last Saturday of July, she said their family gathers for a large reunion at a farm in Juda, and she always gave him a ride to it.
She also said there were never any concerns about depression or suicide with Eldred.
“David was a very happy, jolly person,” she said.