A 42-year-old woman who caused a crash in which a friend died of massive head injuries was on Friday sentenced to two years and two months in prison.
Justice Cheryll Richards told Ygnacia Rafaelina Francisco Payero that the level of carelessness she had shown was close to dangerous driving. She highlighted that the defendant only had a provisional Cayman licence and had been drinking before the crash, which placed her at the higher end of the scale.
Richards said, “The court considers the culpability is particularly high in this case so that the mitigating factors of injuries to the defendant and closeness to the victim have less effect.
“Notably, the injuries which the defendant received do not appear to be at a great level of seriousness.”
She added, “The prosecution submitted that, under the Cayman Islands sentencing guidelines, the offending was at the level of high culpability because the driving can be categorised as driving not far short of dangerous driving.”
Payero last year denied a charge of causing death by dangerous driving, but pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of causing death by careless driving.
The court heard the defendant’s friend and front-seat passenger, Aleiny Revé Villegas, who was 20, died after Payero, who was speeding, lost control of her Honda Accord and crashed into a wall after she sped along George Town’s Eastern Avenue and overtook another car at the traffic lights at the junction with Godfrey Nixon Way.
The August 2022 incident, which claimed the life of Villegas, originally from Cuba and who was a month short of her 21st birthday, also seriously injured two other women in the back seat.
Richards said there were two aggravating factors: the death and injuries caused plus the combination of consuming two brandy-based drinks and driving without supervision when Payero only had a provisional Cayman licence.
The court earlier heard Payero had passed a driving test in the Dominican Republic, her homeland, but the licence had expired in 2021.
Richards said that Payero, who had a Spanish-speaking interpreter in court, had not tried to avoid blame and expressed her remorse for what she had done.
The judge added, “She cooperated with police and volunteered the information she had two mixed drinks with Hennessy before the crash.”
Richards said Payero also accepted that she was travelling at 50mph and reached 60mph when she hit the wall, almost double the speed limit for the stretch of road she was on.
She added that the car was also using the space-saver spare tyre, which is thinner than the standard tyre, at the time of the crash. Space-saver tyres should only be driven on at lower speeds.
Richards said that evidence showed that the two women in the back seat had suffered injuries that were in “the highest category under the guidelines”.
She added that Villegas was not wearing a seatbelt at the time of the crash, but that did not meet the test for a mitigating factor, especially in the context of Payero’s behaviour behind the wheel on the night of the crash.
Richards said Payero’s drinking before the crash could be “reasonably inferred” to have impaired her judgment and affected her decision to drive at “excessive speed”.
She added, “To have made the judgment call to overtake in the vicinity of a traffic light must surely have been a result of impaired thinking.”
But Richards said, taking account of mitigating factors such as Payero’s guilty plea, her remorse and attempts to help support the two surviving passengers, she would cut the sentence from the starting point of three years and ten months to two years and two months.
She also ordered a three-year driving ban to begin upon Payero’s release from prison.
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