No longer a heartbroken teenager, Louise Egan Brunstad is now in prison, serving time because she killed a 30-year-old mother almost five years ago in a failed attempt to kill herself by slamming into an on-coming car.
Brunstad was 16 on Oct. 4, 2006, when she texted a countdown to impact with Nancy Salado-Mayo’s 1999 Daewoo -- “Nine, eight, seven, six … I’m going to do it.”
Brunstad had turned her family’s Mercedes-Benz into a weapon; she wanted to die because another girl had rebuffed efforts to have a relationship.
Salado-Mayo was killed and her 6-year-old daughter, Lesly, was seriously injured but has since recovered. Salado-Mayo was buried in Mexico.
On April 27 of this year, Brunstad, now 20, began her three-year prison sentence at Arrendale State Prison. She pleaded guilty April 1 to first degree vehicular homicide, aggravated assault with a motor vehicle, serious injury by vehicle, reckless driving, driving on the wrong side of the road and speeding. The indictment returned four years ago included one count of felony murder but that charge was reduced to vehicular homicide as part of the plea agreement.
"She is extremely guilt-ridden about what took place," her attorney, Drew Findling, said Friday. "She lives with that struggle every day. She accepted prison time with her chin up, realizing she had to pay a punitive price, and she took it like a soldier."
Fulton District Attorney Paul Howard told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution he agreed to take a guilty plea to vehicular homicide instead of murder based of Brunstad's mental condition at the time. He said she was bi-polar and had other emotional problems.
The plea agreement that included three years in prison was reached even though Salado Mayo's husband disagreed with the punishment.
"He thought the sentence was much too lenient. He thought she should have got life in prison," Howard said of Mario Bibiano.
Bibiano, a steel worker, could not be reached Thursday.
Howard said, however, that Brunstad had had a "really troubled life" and he took that into consideration.
In the years since the accident, Brunstad was in a residential treatment facility and reports from there convinced prosecutors that her "emotional and psychological problems" were to blame, Howard said.
Findling said prosecutors and the judge were kept apprised of Brunstad's progress in treatment so that could be considered when her sentenced was imposed.
Brunstad was sentenced under Georgia’s First Offender Act, meaning the public record of her crime will be erased if she completes her prison sentence and another 12 years probation and enrolls in a mental health program.
Brunstad was in the 10th grade at Holy Innocents' Episcopal School in Sandy Springs and had been moved to despair after a fellow student rejected her romantic advances, prosecutors said.
She got into the family car and set out to end her life. Brunstad crossed paths with Salado-Mayo around 8:30 p.m as the mother, with her daughter in a car seat, was driving to Jason's Deli in Buckhead to check her work schedule.
Witnesses said Brunstad never took her foot off the accelerator as she slammed into the Daewoo. She suffered only a minor ankle injury.
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