St. Louis Man Gets Life for Fatal Car Crash. Some Say Race Played a Factor

Yesterday in St. Louis Circuit Court, a judge handed down a life sentence plus 17 years to a 34-year-old man who in 2020 caused a car crash that killed one woman and injured another.

On July 21, 2020, Deandre Carter was driving a stolen Mitsubishi Outlander SUV at a high rate of speed westbound on Page Boulevard when he used the shoulder to pass another car. He clipped the side of that car in the process of passing it, then swerved onto the other side of the road and into oncoming traffic.

Carter collided head-on with a Nissan Altima being driven by Paige Walker, 28, with her mother, Shirley Brown-Walker, riding in the passenger seat. Walker was killed in the crash, while Brown-Walker was injured but survived.

Prosecutors charged Carter with involuntary manslaughter, assault and armed criminal action.

Several family members spoke in court about the heartache they've felt over the past three years. Walker had purchased a home across the street from her parents, and family members recounted the pain they felt seeing someone else now living in the home where Paige had once meticulously decorated for holidays and hosted family pumpkin-carving events for Halloween.

"Paige had so much going for her," her brother Joe Dale said.

Walker's pastor Kevin Davis said that Walker had completed a carpentry trade school, was the only female in her class and was looking forward to using her skills to help out at the church.

The case took almost three years to work its way through the courts. Judge Michael Noble stated in court yesterday that at one point in the process he told prosecutors they weren't taking the case "seriously enough" given that there was a death involved. The St. Louis Circuit Attorney's Office had worked out a plea deal with Carter's public defender for him to get a 9 or 10 year sentence, but Judge Noble rejected it. The case went to trial at the end of February and on March 1 a jury found Carter guilty.

At this morning's sentencing hearing, prosecutor Chris Doyle-Lohse, filling in for Assistant Circuit Attorney Adam Field, said that the state was asking for a 20-year sentence. Carter's public defender Mia Griffin asked for nine years.

Walker’s family and friends who spoke in court, as well as Shirley Walker-Brown herself, asked Judge Noble that Carter be given life.

"I'm just going to be honest," Walker-Brown said. "You killed my baby. A life for a life. Mine is gone. What are you still walking around for? What are you still breathing for?"

"Do you know what it feels like to have breath in your body but still feel dead?" asked the victim's sister Lacreasia Walker, who went on to stress to the court that Walker-Brown is still experiencing flashbacks after having to witness her daughter's last moments.

"Enough is enough," Lacreasia said. "We need to make a stand and a statement."

In lobbying for a lighter sentence, Griffin called Carter "a reflection of this city," saying that he'd been raised by a single mother, had been shot at age 16 and had many family members who had been wounded by gun violence as well.

Judge Noble ultimately sided with the family, handing down a life sentence plus 17 years. A family member of Carter's present in the courtroom began to cry, and Carter seemed to be blinking back tears of his own.

"I just got a life sentence for a car accident?" Carter said after sentencing.

"That's not what you got a life sentence for," Judge Noble replied.

Under Missouri law, a life sentence is calculated to be 30 years. Carter will be eligible for parole, though it's unclear how many years he will have to serve until then.

Matthew Mahaffey with the state's public defender office says he certainly understands the Walker family wanting a harsh sentence for the man who took Walker’s life, but that Carter's sentence stands out when compared to recent sentences handed down to individuals convicted of similar crimes.

In March, 28-year-old Fenton man David Thurby got an eight-year sentence for a drunk driving crash that killed a family of three, including a 4-month-old baby boy.

Mahaffey also cites the case of Trenton Geiger, a 23-year-old from Town and Country, who in 2020 was accused of “huffing inhalants” while driving, causing a crash that killed an urgent care employee in Ballwin. Geiger was sentenced to just two years in prison.

"There was no intention here," Mahaffey says of the Carter case. "That wasn't even part of the charge that he intentionally did this. He did not mean for those people to die, just like the gentleman in Hillsboro did not mean for them to die. And Geiger, in this county, they did not mean for that to happen."

Both Thurby and Geiger hired private criminal defense attorneys and crucially, as far as Mahaffey is concerned, those two men are white. Carter is Black.

Mahaffey says, "For whatever reason, [Carter] is now facing a ton of time. And a lot of people that don't look like him have fared a lot better."

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