Woman in fatal DUI case could go home

DADE CITY -- Seventy-year-old Maria Krilly Lindsay has been convicted of killing a man while driving drunk and sentenced to 11 years in prison, but instead of heading into state custody, she might be going home.

Circuit Judge Wayne Cobb on Thursday agreed to let Lindsay go free if she can raise $50,000 bail while she awaits the result of her appeal, a process her attorney said could last months, maybe even a year or longer.

Making an emotional appeal to the judge, Lindsay said she worried that even if her appeal is successful, her chronically ill, 79-year-old husband might die while she is in prison.

Her husband, Elmer, sat alone in the courtroom galleries. He wept as his wife asked the judge to send her home with him.

"I love my family," Maria Lindsay told the judge.

Prosecutor Phil Van Allen objected to releasing her.

Lindsay, a Homosassa resident, was driving drunk Dec. 3, 2000, when she drove her pickup truck north in the southbound lanes of U.S. 301 on Dade City's south side. Her truck slammed into a car driven by 76-year-old Gerald DeLong of Dade City.

DeLong, a World War II veteran who had survived the invasion of Iwo Jima, died in a hospital three days later.

At her trial in November, Maria Lindsay testified she only had one drink at the Seminole Indian casino in Tampa before heading home. She claimed she got lost on the way and was confused when she got to Dade City.

But prosecutors contended tests showed Lindsay had a blood alcohol level of 0.15 percent, nearly twice the 0.08 percent threshold at which the state presumes someone is impaired. Witnesses said she smelled of alcohol and was belligerent.

She also was convicted of drunken driving in 1997.

At sentencing Jan. 2, Lindsay said she was remorseful, but didn't admit to driving drunk.

"I wish it would have been me instead of him," she said at sentencing. "I never dreamed in my lifetime I would ever harm anyone. I didn't intend to do anything wrong. I was just confused that night."

Lindsay's public defender, Dillon Vizcarra, told the judge his appeal would attack testimony made by investigators and testimony regarding the way blood evidence was presented.

Cobb said he agreed some of the appeal issues could be favored by the Second District Court of Appeal, and he ruled bail while she is waiting for the appeal is not unreasonable.

He set bail at $50,000, the approximate value of the couple's home.

After the hearing, Vizcarra said there is no guarantee Maria Lindsay will go home. He said her family will still have to struggle to come up with the $5,000 that it will cost to have a bail bondsman cover the amount of the bail, even with the house to secure the bail.

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