(Monroe is just about in the center of New Jersey)
MONROE —Andrea Lemons faces $200 in fines and will lose her license for 30 days in a sentence handed down Wednesday by the Monroe Township Municipal Court for hitting and killing a husband and wife riding a motorcycle last Thanksgiving Day.
Monroe Prosecutor Robert Smith said Judge Nicholas Lacovara's sentence is the maximum available for Lemons' plea of failing to stop at a stop sign. An examination by the Gloucester County Prosecutors Office following the accident showed Lemons, who was 29 at the time of the accident, could not be charged criminally.
The fatal incident occurred around 9:15 a.m. when Mark Shiplee, 54, and his wife, Debora, 49, of the Franklinville section of Franklin, were driving their 2007 Harley Davidson motorcycle to a Thanksgiving event in Cherry Hill for out-of-state soldiers preparing for deployment to Iraq.
The Shiplees, who were wearing helmets, were traveling north on Tuckahoe Road near the Gloucester County Veterans Memorial Cemetery when they were hit by a 2007 BMW driven by Lemons. She ran a stop sign while traveling west on Franklinville-Williamstown Road, police said.
The motorcycle, which Mark Shiplee was driving, went into a spin and hurtled down Franklinville-Williamstown Road before stopping. Debora Shiplee died at the scene while her husband was taken by ambulance to Kennedy Memorial Hospital in Washington Township, where he later died.
Smith said a careless driving charge against Lemons was dropped as it referred to the same instance of running the stop sign.
Family members of the Shiplees could not be reached for comment on Friday. Smith said many of the couple's family, which included six children and 12 grandchildren, were present for the sentencing on Wednesday.
"It's just an extremely tragic situation," Smith said.
An attorney representing Lemons could not be reached for comment on Friday.
Like all traffic fatalities, Smith said the accident was reviewed by the Gloucester County Prosecutors Office.
County Prosecutor Sean Dalton said it was determined Lemons was not driving recklessly at the time of the accident, a determination needed to file a criminal charge of death by auto or vehicular manslaughter.
"In order to be found to be reckless there must be a conscious disregard of a known risk," he said.
This could include driving at an excessive speed, driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol or driving in a vehicle with serious safety concerns.
"We carefully reviewed this case from many different angles to determine if there was any basis to charge the driver criminally," he said.
While he described it as "the worst kind of case where two fine individuals lost their life," Dalton said the facts of the incident do not support a criminal investigation.
Through a scientific reconstruction of the accident it was determined that Lemons was traveling somewhere between 53 and 57 miles per hour at the time of the accident, said Lt. Anthony Pace, director of the Monroe Police Department's Traffic Safety Bureau.
The posted speed limit is 45 miles per hour.
From the beginning, police determined that drugs or alcohol were not a factor in the incident.
Pace said Lemons was subject to a blood test when she was taken to the hospital for minor injuries following the accident but was not given a Breathalyzer because there was no evidence at all to link alcohol to the incident.
"We really tried to pull out our most powerful magnifying glass to find out what happened here," Pace said
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Topic: Driver who killed 2 motorcyclists in Monroe fined $200 (Read 5364 times)