SEATTLE — Editor's note: The above video about the forklift driver waiving his first appearance aired on Feb. 10.
Federal prosecutors say a sport-utility vehicle that collided with a forklift in Seattle last week, killing one of the SUV's passengers, was being driven by a defendant who had been kicked out of a treatment facility hours earlier and who was overdue to report to the U.S. District Court downtown.
Gianni Thomas, 25, is facing drug trafficking and gun charges filed last year in federal court. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Seattle says that when he committed those crimes, he was under state Department of Corrections supervision following a prison term for felony domestic violence.
While Thomas was initially ordered to be held in custody on the federal charges, U.S. District Judge Robert Lasnik granted his release to an in-patient behavioral health facility in Everett last month for treatment of mental health and substance abuse issues.
Prosecutors said Thomas immediately began acting up at the facility, which finally kicked him out on Feb. 7. But, according to a memo filed Wednesday by the U.S. Attorney's Office, the facility did not give notice to enable the U.S. Marshals Service to pick him up and take him into custody.
Instead, Thomas' sister-in-law picked him up, and rather than travel directly to the federal courthouse in Seattle as instructed, they drove around Everett, stopping for frozen yogurt and at a Walgreens, among other places, prosecutors wrote, citing GPS tracking data.
Prosecutors say the pair then headed south. Thomas was driving when the SUV collided with the forklift and then an oncoming landscaping truck, killing his sister-in-law, identified as Jessica Valdez, a mother of three young children. Thomas was injured and spent several days in a hospital.
Seattle police responded and said they found the driver of the forklift intoxicated; a breath test showed his blood-alcohol content to be more than twice the legal limit, a police report said. He was arrested for investigation of vehicular homicide.
Police said that day that the forklift driver had caused the crash, forcing the SUV into the path of the landscaping truck. But as of Friday, investigators still had not referred the case against the forklift driver to the King County Prosecutor's Office, and it remained unclear if investigators were re-evaluating the cause of the crash.
The department's public affairs office declined to provide further information about the investigation.
Vanessa Pai-Thompson, a public defender representing Thomas on the federal charges, was out of the office Thursday and Friday in advance of the holiday weekend and did not immediately return an email seeking comment.
During a detention hearing last fall and in court documents, she noted that Thomas' father had been killed by police in 2007, and that police had paid the family to settle litigation over the death.
In a memo filed Wednesday, the U.S. Attorney's Office blasted the treatment center's handling of the case. While the facility, North Sound Behavioral Health, notified Thomas' attorney that he needed to be picked up, and she later passed that message along, the center did not directly notify the U.S. Probation Office.
“The procedures that were followed in this case are unacceptable,” wrote Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg. “When a defendant is terminated from a treatment facility that he is attending pursuant to the Court’s appearance bond, the facility should notify the Probation Office, not defense counsel. Had that occurred here ... Thomas would have been brought immediately to the courthouse without incident for his initial appearance.”
Pioneer Human Services, which operates the treatment center, did not immediately comment in response to a request from The Associated Press.