Man sentenced in fatal car crash

Bill Gang

Thursday, July 22, 1999 | 10:22 a.m.

A Las Vegas man who fled on foot into the rugged Mount Charleston terrain after a collision left a 2-year-old girl dead has been sentenced to the maximum prison term of 12 to 30 years.

The lengthy sentence for 30-year-old Juan Morales, who pleaded guilty to two felony charges in a plea bargain, was in stark contrast to early legal maneuvering that nearly allowed him to escape any punishment.

Before the blood-alcohol report was obtained and all charges were filed, an inexperienced deputy district attorney plea bargained the preliminary charges to a single count of attempting to leave the scene of an accident, Deputy District Attorney Gary Booker said.

Morales posted the $1,000 bail, but he was not released. Instead, he was turned over to the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which sent him to a federal facility in Arizona for eventual deportation to Mexico -- a move that Morales did not contest.

But Booker said a sharp-eyed INS agent looked at the accident report and pondered whether the deportation was premature. A check with Clark County officials confirmed the agent's suspicions and alerted prosecutors to the near-loss of the defendant.

Morales was returned to Las Vegas to face nine charges of drunken driving, reckless driving and involuntary manslaughter.

In a plea bargain last month, Morales pleaded guilty to a single felony DUI charge encompassing all four victims.

In District Judge Michael Douglas's courtroom Wednesday, Ronnie Lynn Brancolino cried as she told Morales how he "took away my life, my child and my husband."

Brancolino was in a wheelchair because of disabling injuries she suffered in the July 12, 1998, incident that killed her daughter, Brittany, and injured two other family members as they were returning to Las Vegas from a Mount Charleston outing.

Booker, who heads the district attorney's DUI team, said the strain of coping with the aftermath of the fatal collision resulted in Brancolino and her husband getting divorced.

The collision occurred when Morales' car drifted at high speed into the wrong lane on State Route 158 and collided nearly head-on with the car driven by Greg Brancolino.

Booker said the defendant's car struck at the spot where Brittney Brancolino was strapped securely in a car seat.

The baby's uncle, Michael Brancolino, suffered fractured ribs and a broken arm and another uncle, James Flood, was knocked unconscious.

Booker said that after the incident Morales and a friend surveyed the damage for a few minutes and then decided to flee on foot, leaving behind a female friend with a broken ankle.

Morales' attorney, Waldo DeCastroverde, said the defendant "panicked and did something shameful -- he left and he ran."

Six hours later the pair was picked up as they tried to hitchhike along a mountain road, Booker said.

Even that long after the incident, Morales' blood-alcohol level was tested at 0.07 percent, indicating that at the time of the collision it likely was more than twice the legal limit of the 0.10 percent necessary to prove drunken driving.

Morales, speaking through an interpreter, apologized to the family of the dead girl and said his responsibility for the incident "hurts me to my soul."