State police have upgraded the charges against a man accused of causing a chain-reaction crash on I-85 that killed a stranded motorist and injured a state trooper.
Paul Beaube Burgess, of Marion Junction, Ala., is now charged with vehicular homicide in the first degree, a felony, Lt. Paul Cosper of the Georgia State Patrol said Wednesday.
Burgess, 28, was driving south from a business meeting in Atlanta on Thursday afternoon when he collided with a Nissan Rouge ahead of him, police said, sending the Nissan into a disabled van in the center median.
The van had a flat tire, and Donald Clyatt Moore, 51, of Newnan, was standing between it and a concrete barrier, with a state trooper who had stopped to help with the repair. The van was pushed into them by the impact, causing non-life-threatening abrasions to Trooper Brandon Kight. Moore was flown to Atlanta Medical Center, where he died the next day.
Burgess was charged last week with driving under the influence of prescription drugs, serious injury by vehicle and following too closely. On Wednesday, Cosper said the new charge was added as a result of Moore's death.
A conviction on felony vehicular homicide can bring three to 15 years in prison.
Burgess' lawyer has told the AJC that his client takes Adderall for a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder but that he was not driving under the influence of the drug. The lawyer, D. Scott Cummins, of Newnan, said the actual cause of the crash was likely fatigue and that Burgess "may have, just for a second, nodded off."
Burgess is a general manager with a Fortune 500 company that deals in scrap iron and had just left a company meeting in Atlanta before the 5:15 p.m. crash, Cummins said. The lawyer said people who attended the meeting and saw Burgess climb into his pickup truck afterward told him Burgess was not impaired.
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