BY DONNA WESTFALL
Coulter Mann didn’t take a gun and deliberately set out to shoot somebody. That would be murder, right?
What he did was drink too much, jump in his vehicle, talk on his cell phone while driving and kill Kenneth Jones in a collision. And for that the Judge pronounced a 3 year prison sentence. Sound fair? Don’t think so.
Family, friends and community members staged a protest across the street from the Sherriff’s station at 5th & G Street, Monday night, March 10th, while Coulter Mann turned himself in. Questions on everyone’s mind are pretty obvious. Was the Judge bought off? Why was the 6 year sentence reduced to 3 years? Why is Judge Richard Kalustian even thinking about changing Mann’s sentence now? Was the Judge bought off?
Intent on getting justice for her father, Kendra Jones, spoke to Channel 3 News during the protest which was aired on the nightly news.
A community member has contacted Mother’s Against Drunk Driving (MADD) to begin the process on getting national exposure.
This is not going to go away unless and until there is Justice for Kenneth Jones.
It’s really ironic that Del Norte High School has a yearly event which tries to teach students to not drink and drive by staging an event so real if you happened upon it you’d think a real emergency was taking place. Ambulances, stretchers, crashed cars with victims covered in fake blood all make the event a dramatic learning tool. Maybe it’s time for the Del Norte County Unified School District to send all their principals, teachers, staff and Superintendent to this event to learn those same valuable lessons. If you drink, you don’t drive.
Sad!! Good Old Boys at work again.
It is so wrong, that an individual that works for Del Norte School system can drink alcohol at a party, get on his phone and drive his car. It has been in bedded in our heads that if your going to a party and drink you take a responsible person with you to drive you home. What kind of message is that!!!! That person needs to be accountable to show the public that this is NOT OK for his actions!!! Do you think the children that goes to his school, may think some day, hey lets drink alcohol and P A R T Y, because if we get caught nothing is going to happen to us, hey even if we kill somebody, Judge Richard Kalustian will only give us three years in prison!!! Again what kind of message is that?? I couldn’t live with myself, if I was in his shoes. The sick thing about this, he will get credit for time severed (if he already was in jail before he went in last week) and if he get’s 3 years prison, it’s really only half of that, so 1.5 years for killing Kenneth Jones, an innocent person driving his car and happened to be a the wrong place at the wrong time. No, Justice is not served for Kenneth Jones, nor his family!!! This is ironic to me, some people think Native Americans were known in the day to be drinkers, well this Native American wasn’t the drinker in this situation!!!