Crossing the Line

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Speaker 3 All of a sudden, I realized what's going on.

Speaker 1 Why are they late?

Speaker 3 Something definitely was wrong.

Speaker 3 He said, your family was an accident.

Speaker 4 I had my own world strapped down from underneath me.

Speaker 5 The scene told the story.

Speaker 1 What did you find?

Speaker 6 Something I don't want to see again.

Speaker 5 A deadly crash on a dark road. Two gone, one barely alive.
A tragic accident. But in all the broken glass and twisted metal, was there a clue to a crime?

Speaker 6 The last thing I wanted was to have to take a double fatality and have to not treat it as a homicide.

Speaker 5 Murder. An accusation no one saw coming.

Speaker 1 I couldn't deal with it.

Speaker 5 Two families in torment.

Speaker 7 We were both just

Speaker 5 a small-town trial with big emotions.

Speaker 1 You took it.

Speaker 5 You did it. And the verdict.

Speaker 8 We the jury.

Speaker 5 That would shake them all.

Speaker 5 Welcome to Dateline. I'm Lester Holt, big sky country, a small town and a famously dangerous highway.

Speaker 5 That was the setting for a deadly crash that would seem to unite two families in shock and heartbreak. Except, they were about to find out that this tragedy was also a mystery.

Speaker 5 And the truth about what happened on that late winter night might be darker than anyone knew.

Speaker 1 Here's Keith Morrison.

Speaker 1 March 19th, 2009.

Speaker 1 Night fell heavy in Montana's Flathead Valley. Something off that night, something wrong.
At Mary and Randy Winters' house in Kalispell, anxiety spiked. Where was she?

Speaker 1 It just felt like something was not right.

Speaker 6 It's hard to explain that there's something not normal.

Speaker 1 You could set your clock by their daughter, Justine. That reliable.
But a new driver, too, just 16, new home at 8 from her boyfriend's house.

Speaker 1 And though she wasn't very late, the feeling seeped in like a poison. Something wrong.

Speaker 1 I called her starting about 5 after 8, and no answer.

Speaker 9 Called the house where she was at, and

Speaker 9 they said she had left 15 minutes before that.

Speaker 6 I was thinking she had, you know, went off the road between their house and us.

Speaker 1 Not far away, another family, the other half of our story, was on the road too.

Speaker 1 Erin Thompson was driving her son Caden home from a school concert. He played the drums.

Speaker 3 I had always attended all of Caden's concerts, and this was the first one that I didn't attend because I had car troubles.

Speaker 1 This is Caden's stepfather, Jason Thompson.

Speaker 3 My car was in the shop and finally fixed, and so Aaron dropped me off, and that's why I wasn't with them.

Speaker 1 And soon the poison, the anxiety seeped under Jason's door, through his windows, onto his nerve endings.

Speaker 3 Just all of a sudden, I realized, what's going on? You know, why are they late? And it just struck me that something definitely was wrong.

Speaker 1 At Justine Winters' house, the fear was deepened now. Justine's dad, Randy, was a National Guardsman, a volunteer firefighter.
He was trained to keep his head, knew what he had to do.

Speaker 1 Randy got in his truck, drove out of town to the road he knew she'd take coming home from her boyfriend's house.

Speaker 1 And then he saw it in a construction zone on the Highway 93 overpass.

Speaker 1 What did you find?

Speaker 6 Something I don't want to see again.

Speaker 6 You could say fireman's worst nightmare.

Speaker 1 Someone tried to hold him back. He kept on.

Speaker 6 And then I saw her over at the side.

Speaker 1 His perfect daughter is Justine, obscenely broken,

Speaker 1 but amazingly still alive. How does she look?

Speaker 1 I didn't really

Speaker 6 see a lot

Speaker 6 of her on, you know, on the gurney there, but

Speaker 6 I got to see her, you know, at the hospital.

Speaker 1 She's pretty bad.

Speaker 6 You know, you don't want to ever see your kid in the hospital.

Speaker 1 Every bit of her was damaged horribly, broken bones, brain damage, ruptured organs.

Speaker 1 The chance she'd survive, slim, said the doctors.

Speaker 1 But the winter's news could have been worse.

Speaker 1 And a few miles away, where the phone rang at Jason Thompson's house, the news was much worse.

Speaker 1 The caller was the county coroner.

Speaker 3 He said, Jason,

Speaker 1 your...

Speaker 3 Your family was in an accident. And he said, I'm sorry to have to tell you this on the phone, but they're just killed.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 4 my world just dropped out from underneath me.

Speaker 1 Jason's wife, 35-year-old Aaron Thompson, was four months pregnant. Her son, Caden, the boy who just played the drums at his school concert, was just 13.

Speaker 1 And just like that, they were gone. The crash was head-on.
And in school counselor Jason Thompson's life, the lights went out. That night of

Speaker 3 that realization, I'll never forget that

Speaker 3 news.

Speaker 1 Nor, of course, will Erin's mother, Diana.

Speaker 7 We were both just bonkers, just

Speaker 1 or her sister, Amber, who with David, her husband, missed Erin so much they'd made plans to move to Montana to be close.

Speaker 1 Not possible now.

Speaker 10 That was the hardest.

Speaker 11 The hardest piece of news news we could fathom.

Speaker 8 And to lose both of them and the baby, it just didn't even seem like it could be real.

Speaker 1 And in the little house he shared with the love of his life,

Speaker 1 where he'd been waiting with such excitement for their baby to arrive, Jason, like Job of old, was overcome by the heaviest sorrow. of a whole life of sorrows.

Speaker 1 It's like I'm nine years old and, you know, in

Speaker 3 79 when my sister dies, and then I'm 19 years old and at 89 when my mother dies of cancer, and then, you know, then now I'm 39 and

Speaker 3 09 and I lose my family.

Speaker 1 Missing that concert,

Speaker 1 you lived.

Speaker 1 How's that been to wrap your head around?

Speaker 3 I've always been embracing life, right?

Speaker 3 But I definitely didn't tend to fear death anymore. There's times where I would have welcomed it.

Speaker 1 But the dreadful truth of it is that accidents happen all around America every day, every night.

Speaker 1 Still, just as the permanence of loss began to sink in, before anyone had given a thought to a now diminished future, there was another piece of news.

Speaker 1 This time, the fatal accident might not have been an accident at all.

Speaker 12 Coming up.

Speaker 6 Last thing I wanted was to have to treat it as a homicide.

Speaker 5 A prosecutor's stunning decision.

Speaker 13 When dateline continues.

Speaker 1 For decades, Montanans have almost morbidly intoned the words, pray for me. I drive Highway 93.

Speaker 1 They say it because of nights like March 19, 2009. Except, as everybody would soon know, this crash on this night may have been no accident.

Speaker 1 A revelation which in Jason Thompson's devastated mind would register later. Just now his whole life was a bomb crater, a ruin.

Speaker 3 Erin was like, my heart, she is soul, mate. You know, I've waited all these years looking, but I was always, I had an ideal, and I was searching for her.

Speaker 1 And she, as she told everybody, had been looking for him.

Speaker 1 Erin was a single mom when Jason met her brilliant smile. She was a hairdresser who loved to dance.

Speaker 1 And she was a seeker in all matters spiritual, her mother, Diana.

Speaker 7 When she was single and a young mother and she was wondering what she was going to do with her life, she answered her own question and just said, well, as long as I'm about the business of spreading love, it doesn't matter.

Speaker 1 Erin married Jason in the summer of 2006 in the glorious Montana sunshine. And young Caden seemed as pleased as she was.

Speaker 1 Caden, who shared his mother and new stepfather's craving for outdoor adventures.

Speaker 3 You know, backpacking on the coast, in the mountains, river rafting. It was all about just sharing

Speaker 3 that time together.

Speaker 1 Yes, and there was that plan Erin hatched with her sister Amber.

Speaker 7 We always had a dream of growing up and living right next door to each other and you know raising up our families.

Speaker 1 And soon the plan expanded beautifully when Erin and Jason announced they were expecting a child of their own.

Speaker 3 Every day I would praise just

Speaker 3 my life, praise my wife and my little baby that I was finally going to have and you know it all made sense.

Speaker 1 And then came March 19th, 2009.

Speaker 1 But as the news and the grief spread,

Speaker 1 there was still hope, remember, for one of the victims of the crash. Justine Winter was alive, though barely, with a broken neck and broken legs and major internal injuries.

Speaker 1 Doctors told the family they didn't think she'd live through the airlift to a hospital in Seattle. What did they tell you?

Speaker 6 They told us three times

Speaker 6 she wouldn't live.

Speaker 1 I said,

Speaker 9 She's flying in that airplane and don't give give me any grief.

Speaker 1 And she did survive the flight to Seattle and the emergency operations to stitch together the broken pieces of her body.

Speaker 1 She was unconscious when she arrived. The doctors kept her that way, induced a coma so she could avoid the pain or any recognition of her desperate condition.

Speaker 1 Well, her body slowly, slowly began to knit itself back together. Until, more than a month later.

Speaker 1 And her eyes just went poo.

Speaker 9 That was just like the most incredible feeling of

Speaker 9 she's there, she's in there, and your heart just beating.

Speaker 1 It was days later before Justine could understand what was going on around her. But the news had to be faced eventually.
And so when she seemed ready, they told her.

Speaker 1 When you told her what happened in the accident and how those other people had died, how did she react to that?

Speaker 4 I was very emotional for her. It was very devastating.

Speaker 1 And then what was discovered was, well, quite frankly, unimaginable.

Speaker 1 For in the middle of that river of tears, relief on the one side, abject grief on the other, there was an undertow, a twist nobody saw coming.

Speaker 1 For while Justine spent 45 days in the hospital recuperating and months more at home in Montana healing, it didn't take investigators very long at all.

Speaker 1 Matter of hours, really, to solve the mystery of who and what caused this crash.

Speaker 1 In fact, the first Montana Highway Patrol officers who raced to the scene in that construction zone believed that Justine Winter's car was the one that crossed the center line and smashed into Aaron Thompson's car.

Speaker 1 But the worst of it, the inconceivable part was, at least as investigators told then Flathead County District Attorney Ed Corrigan, this was not an accident at all.

Speaker 1 What was your first reaction, what do you think?

Speaker 6 Nuts.

Speaker 6 This was the last thing I wanted, was to have to

Speaker 6 take a double fatality and have to now treat it as a homicide.

Speaker 1 Homicide?

Speaker 1 Yes. Right there in Justine's car, officers found what amounted to a minute-by-minute narrative of the events leading up to the collision in text text messages.

Speaker 1 And in those messages, the prosecutor said, was the evidence he believed required him to press criminal charges against that girl doctors had quite miraculously saved, Justine Winter.

Speaker 1 Charges of

Speaker 1 murder.

Speaker 12 Coming up.

Speaker 1 They're suing you for her pain and suffering.

Speaker 13 When Dateline continues.

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Speaker 1 The sorrow ran deep in Montana's Flathead Valley that awful spring and summer of 2009.

Speaker 1 Deep and wide, the whole valley, in fact, the country, heard about the crash that killed Caden and Aaron and her unborn child, and heard a strange and disturbing story: that 16-year-old Justine Winter took deadly aim at Aaron's oncoming car, crossed the center line, and plowed right into them on purpose.

Speaker 1 Shocking.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes.

Speaker 1 As was the alleged reason.

Speaker 1 Justine said the police was trying to die by suicide.

Speaker 1 How did they know?

Speaker 1 They found the evidence on Justine's phone, they said. Text messages, which she wrote herself, and which, once County Attorney Ed Corrigan saw them,

Speaker 1 gave him no choice, he said. He charged her with deliberate homicide, Montana's equivalent of murder.

Speaker 6 Justine purposely went into the wrong lane of traffic and smashed head-on into another car. And by doing so, she should have known her actions could have killed somebody.

Speaker 6 And under those circumstances, I think deliberate homicide was the only charge we could file.

Speaker 1 So he decided to charge her as an adult.

Speaker 1 Why?

Speaker 6 She was 16. She was.
The taking of two lives is not, in my opinion, a delinquent act.

Speaker 6 It is a crime, needs to be prosecuted as a crime, and if convicted, it needs to be on her record for the rest of her life.

Speaker 1 Perhaps because of her own massive injuries, her continuing operations, her age, Justine, after pleading not guilty, was released to house arrest, fitted with an ankle bracelet to await trial.

Speaker 1 She was allowed to attend classes at Glacier High. And at home, her parents fumed.
No matter what those text messages said, The idea Justine would cause that crash on purpose, just crazy.

Speaker 1 You You angry about all of this?

Speaker 6 It builds up inside and it gets to a point where you can't take it anymore.

Speaker 1 Turned out, and it was frankly hardly surprising in a town the size of Kalispell, the two families actually knew each other. Justine's mother and Aaron's mother had worked at the same school.

Speaker 1 Erin's family made it perfectly clear that what they wanted from Justine most of all was a heartfelt apology.

Speaker 1 and some sort of indication she took responsibility for the act with which she was charged. They actually saw that as a way toward forgiveness.

Speaker 1 And most people around town thought that was a fine idea. But from Justine and her family,

Speaker 1 it was just an awkward silence.

Speaker 1 And then early one morning in the fall of 2010, an entirely unexpected knock at the door took emotions to a whole new level.

Speaker 3 This private investigator, you know, just hands me these papers, like he's serving me papers. And it's, you know, to say that they're suing,

Speaker 3 you know, my Erin's estate they're suing you suing

Speaker 3 for her pain and suffering

Speaker 1 it was true in a legal preemptive strike Justine Winter's attorneys had filed a lawsuit on her behalf against Erin's estate as well as three companies in charge of the construction zone where the crash occurred.

Speaker 1 The lawsuit claimed Erin had negligently operated her car resulting in the collision and also that the companies had failed to adequately construct and maintain the vicinity, causing hazardous and confusing conditions for the traveling public.

Speaker 6 I can't even begin to guess what they were thinking about when they decided to file that lawsuit. It

Speaker 1 inflamed the whole town.

Speaker 6 This wasn't Justine's decision. That was a decision made by her attorneys.

Speaker 1 Ah, yes, the attorneys. Their names? Maxwell Battle and David Stuft.

Speaker 1 And according to the Winters, the attorneys assured them the lawsuit, assuming Justine was found not guilty, would give them a better shot at an insurance company reimbursement later.

Speaker 6 There was no intent of going for the estate, making that family endure more than they've already endured.

Speaker 1 But the optics were awful.

Speaker 6 Oh, the timing could have been, who knows, better.

Speaker 1 Oh, you'd pick up the newspaper, you'd look at the blogs, you'd hear the radio, and what you got was those awful people, those disgusting, terrible people. What are they thinking?

Speaker 1 They're trying to sue the victims of this crime.

Speaker 6 That's what was portrayed, but the actual intent was not that

Speaker 6 at all.

Speaker 1 Misunderstood or not, by the time Justine Winter's trial for deliberate homicide started in January 2011, the tide of public opinion had turned as bitter as a Montana winter.

Speaker 1 The hearts of Aaron Thompson's family, too, had toughened.

Speaker 1 And Justine, who showed up in an almost childlike polka dot hairband, certainly didn't look the part of an accused killer facing as many as 200 years behind bars. But there she was.

Speaker 1 I can see the debris field. With the two families just a few feet away, she watched investigators testify to a certainty that it was Justine's Pontiac Grand Dam that crossed the center line.

Speaker 8 Here you can see all this debris from the initial impact of the crash.

Speaker 1 Slamming into Aaron's Subaru so hard

Speaker 1 it was driven backward into the highway barrier and crash reconstructionists agreed.

Speaker 14 Justine Winner's car encroached into the northbound lane, striking Mrs. Thompson's vehicle.

Speaker 1 But what evidence was there that Justine had done it, as the law says, purposefully?

Speaker 1 Investigators pulled the so-called black box out of Justine's potiac, analyzed the data, and found another sign that pointed to suicide.

Speaker 1 She'd taken off her seatbelt.

Speaker 1 The black box also recorded speed, acceleration, and braking and found

Speaker 1 that Justine was accelerating, flooring it, so to speak, in the five seconds before the crash, speeding up from 81 to 86 miles an hour before hitting the brakes at the last second.

Speaker 6 She did not swerve and she drove head on into that other vehicle.

Speaker 1 To back it up, prosecutors pulled the speedometer from Justine's car. Right above the mark indicating 85 miles an hour found an orange mark.
It's known as a slap mark.

Speaker 1 Made, the experts testified, when the needle smashes against the console at high speed.

Speaker 1 And finally, prosecutors revealed the reasoning, they said, behind it all.

Speaker 1 Justine, like many 16-year-old girls, had a boyfriend. Hers was named Ryan.
It was white hot, this relationship.

Speaker 6 He was her world.

Speaker 1 But that day in March, there had been a tiff. It had words.
And so that night she drove Ryan home, asked him to get out of the car. He said they were through.

Speaker 1 Then Justine drove north to clear her head. She was on her way home when, detectives testified, she began texting Ryan, apparently well behind the wheel.
The first text, half an hour before the crash.

Speaker 1 Goodbye, Ryan. Just live your life.

Speaker 16 I love knowing you did change me. My last words, I love you, Ryan.

Speaker 1 Then her text became somehow threatening.

Speaker 16 If I won, I would have you, and I wouldn't crash my car.

Speaker 1 And Ryan answered.

Speaker 8 You kill yourself, I kill myself. So come on, don't be selfish.

Speaker 16 That's the only thing I want to live for.

Speaker 1 You, Ryan, you keep me living.

Speaker 1 Stop.

Speaker 8 You hurt yourself, and I'll know, and I'll do the same.

Speaker 16 That's why I'm going to wreck my car, because all I can do is f up. It shows you would rather me die because I want to kill myself.
Goodbye, Ryan. I love you.

Speaker 1 Then the final message from Ryan.

Speaker 8 You killing yourself is just another way for you to run away.

Speaker 1 And just five or six minutes later, prosecutors said, Justine Winter drove her car into Aaron Thompson's lane of traffic to die by suicide, but instead killed a mother, child, unborn baby.

Speaker 1 The prosecution had made his case for murder. Now the question was, what could Justine Winter's attorneys possibly say to make a jury believe otherwise?

Speaker 5 Coming up, the defense takes on the heart of the case, those texts.

Speaker 13 When Dateline continues.

Speaker 1 Every day in the Montana courtroom, the family of now 17-year-old Justine Winter dutifully shuffled to the front row seats directly behind the defense table.

Speaker 1 Their faces, by their attorney's decree, they say, an intentional blank, emotionless.

Speaker 1 Their apparent demeanor a spur in the side of an already angry town.

Speaker 1 But almost no one knew what was really going on. Justine's mother, Mary, who had been struggling with alcohol, caved in to the stress.
Tell me how it's changed your life. I ran away for a while.

Speaker 1 I couldn't deal with it.

Speaker 9 I just left the house.

Speaker 3 I didn't come back.

Speaker 1 Justine's brother, Kyle, dropped out of college to help keep things together at home and get Justine to her medical appointments.

Speaker 1 And Randy, her father, the strong and tall as a Montana Spruce firefighter and National Guardsman, turned angry and bitter at the continuing prosecution of his little girl.

Speaker 6 I could be sitting and living and watching TV and all of a sudden I hear something, I just completely lose it. Just start crying.

Speaker 1 The whole world said Justine's dad seemed intent on misunderstanding, demonizing his little girl.

Speaker 1 Yet he said she'd always been so good, kind, thoughtful, and responsible, was getting almost straight A's in high school, but mostly wouldn't harm a bug, literally.

Speaker 1 and cared about people, would never, never want to hurt that sweet woman or her son or her baby.

Speaker 3 Always had a smile, always

Speaker 3 wanting to help is

Speaker 3 who she was.

Speaker 1 What kind of a little girl was this? She was just

Speaker 1 a good girl.

Speaker 1 But it might interest you to know that as the winters spoke to us, they were doing so against the expressed advice of their attorneys.

Speaker 1 And when it was time for Justine's defense team to make its case in court, attorneys Maxwell Battle and David Stuft told the jury that everything the prosecution told them, everything they knew about the case so far, was

Speaker 1 wrong. What happened out there was an accident,

Speaker 1 including where the crash occurred. Remember, the prosecution's experts testified there was no doubt Justine crossed the center line and veered into Erin Thompson's lane, causing the crash.

Speaker 1 But a forensic engineer hired by the defense said his research turned that finding on its head. He claimed it was Erin who drove out of her lane in that construction zone and struck Justine.

Speaker 1 And the defense went further, claiming that slat mark near the 85-mile mark in the speedometer of Justine's car was planted there by investigators.

Speaker 1 That the black box that measured speed and braking was plain wrong. That Justine always wore her seatbelt.

Speaker 1 And finally, A psychologist said, well, actually a lot of experts said, that a spat with a boy wasn't enough to lead to a suicide attempt.

Speaker 1 And those texts, they should not be considered a suicide note at all.

Speaker 7 It was a way of exercising power and control

Speaker 17 in the relationship to make that kind of threat.

Speaker 7 But it was always clear that it was never meant.

Speaker 1 What would Justine Winter say about what happened that night, about those texts? The jury would never know. She did not testify.

Speaker 1 On the advice of attorneys, said her family, and of course that was her perfect right. but there was another reason, too.

Speaker 1 Justine suffered a brain injury in that crash, so her recollection of the last few days leading up to the crash and that night itself, she doesn't remember.

Speaker 1 She is charged with a crime about which her memory is a complete blank.

Speaker 1 So then, how could the jury know Justine knowingly crossed the center line, having decided to take her own life by hitting the other car.

Speaker 1 A question we put to the prosecutor. In order to draw that conclusion, you have to read her mind, essentially.
You've been a prosecutor for years.

Speaker 1 You know that car accidents happen in the most bizarre ways, that people do crazy things on the road.

Speaker 1 But you've clearly said this was a situation in which I know what somebody was thinking when they drove across that lane of traffic and into that other car. No.

Speaker 1 I just don't know how you can know what she's thinking.

Speaker 6 I can't know what she was thinking. Nobody knows what she was thinking at the time.
Right. She doesn't know what what she was thinking at the time.

Speaker 6 All I can do is base my decision on what the evidence shows.

Speaker 1 Did the evidence clearly show that Justine Winter had made up her mind to die by suicide by driving into an oncoming car?

Speaker 1 Up to the jury now.

Speaker 12 Coming up.

Speaker 11 Everyone just cried about it.

Speaker 5 A verdict comes quickly, but the pain and one final question remain.

Speaker 13 When dateline continues.

Speaker 18 Some stories never make national headlines, but stories from small towns and coastal communities deserve recognition too.

Speaker 18 I'm Kylie Lowe, host of Dark Down East, a true crime podcast that gives voice to victims through investigative journalism and powerful storytelling.

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Speaker 1 As a Montana jury prepared to decide the fate of 17-year-old Justine Winter, the members of Aaron and Caden's family struggled to hang on to the frayed remnants of their former goodwill.

Speaker 1 They had tried so hard not to be angry at Justine.

Speaker 1 That is until they were served with that lawsuit, blaming the crash on Erin, and then watched defense attorneys battle and stuffed twist, as they saw it anyway.

Speaker 1 What the family believed were the facts of the case.

Speaker 1 You're unusual as victims because of this willingness to forgive Justine.

Speaker 3 It's the adults in her life that should be, are steering her in this direction. It's not her decisions.
You know, it's these adults. So I've had plenty of anger towards them.

Speaker 1 But for Justine's family, too, there was considerable strain. So much that Justine's father, Randy, buckled under the pressure and was rushed to the hospital and not present in the courtroom.

Speaker 15 I will ask the clerk to file the verdict and to read it, please.

Speaker 1 When after just four hours of deliberation, the jury came back.

Speaker 14 We, the jury, enter the following unanimous verdict to the charge of deliberate homicide for the death of Aaron Thompson, guilty.

Speaker 14 For the death of Caden Odell, guilty.

Speaker 1 This was

Speaker 3 absolutely a horrible numbing experience that

Speaker 3 put my head to my knees.

Speaker 10 It was like the whole courtroom. I felt like everyone just cried about it.

Speaker 1 How did she look, Mary?

Speaker 1 She was led off to jail.

Speaker 1 Your little girl.

Speaker 9 She looked very stunned.

Speaker 1 She didn't look.

Speaker 1 Just a week after that verdict, Justine Winter marked her 18th birthday in a jail cell.

Speaker 1 And then came sentencing day.

Speaker 1 And everyone wondered, would Justine finally tell Erin's husband, her family, what they desperately wanted to hear?

Speaker 1 In your ideal world, what would you like to hear from

Speaker 1 Justine?

Speaker 7 To be sorry for what she took from us because it was

Speaker 7 huge.

Speaker 1 But just before sentencing, the family received a statement written by Justine.

Speaker 1 And it wasn't even close to what they were looking for. In it, she called herself a miracle who was wrongly convicted of a horrific crime.

Speaker 1 She wrote that she would never, ever in a million years take her own life or anyone else's.

Speaker 1 that this was an accident that had been blown out of proportion, that she didn't need time behind bars, just a chance to turn a horrific situation into a positive one.

Speaker 1 And so, with this statement in mind, the family of Aaron and Caden took the stand to have their own say.

Speaker 11 I want for you to make something positive of your life through this, but you still have yet to grasp the truth.

Speaker 1 Caden's father, the same message, more anger. You took him, you did it,

Speaker 1 and you need to own it.

Speaker 1 You killed my boy.

Speaker 3 You need to own it.

Speaker 1 And finally, Caden's stepfather, Jason, the elementary school counselor, first displaying compassion, then a rare stream of venom aimed at Justine's defense team, the attorneys battle and stuffed.

Speaker 3 I've chosen not to believe that you, in crashing your car that night, wanted to harm or would ever. think about harming them.

Speaker 3 But it has been very, very, very difficult to hold on to that thought, given that you've been led by these two men and influenced by them to not do what is most important in all of this and is show and demonstrate to us that you are sorry for having taken them.

Speaker 1 Then, finally, the moment, as Justine Winter herself took the stand to speak for the first time.

Speaker 10 I've wanted to speak with you for

Speaker 10 two years now.

Speaker 10 I've wanted to let you guys know that my heart goes out to you.

Speaker 10 And as every single one of you came up here today,

Speaker 10 my heart was breaking.

Speaker 10 But I just hope that you guys will be able to forgive that I will never be able to say that I intentionally crossed the center line

Speaker 10 wanting to take three lives from all of you.

Speaker 1 But before the judge allowed Justine to leave the witness stand, the prosecutor stepped to the podium and asked a question on behalf of the victims' families. A question

Speaker 1 that froze the courtroom.

Speaker 6 What they've wanted to hear from you for a long, long time also

Speaker 6 is I'm sorry.

Speaker 6 Can you tell them that?

Speaker 4 I'm sorry for your loss,

Speaker 10 but I cannot.

Speaker 10 I don't know what you're meaning by you want me to say that I'm sorry

Speaker 1 and so the hammer came down to the order of the court the defendant is committed for a period of 30 years with 15 years suspended Justine was sentenced to 15 years in prison and her father back on his feet and in court for sentencing day began his own prison term the one deep inside his own soul.

Speaker 6 The system betrayed me. You could say, serve a country, and then you feel betrayed about it?

Speaker 1 You feel betrayed by the country you fought for.

Speaker 6 About the judicial part of the system.

Speaker 1 They took her, this once promising college-bound honor student, to a cell in the Montana Women's Prison, where she instantly became the youngest inmate in the place.

Speaker 1 And two months later, those attorneys, stuffed and battled, who declined our requests for interviews, were off the case. That civil lawsuit was dropped.

Speaker 1 And that's when Justine Winter decided to tell us her side of the whole sad story.

Speaker 12 Coming up,

Speaker 5 an exclusive interview with Justine.

Speaker 1 You say it's probably you who caused that accident. Are you able to say I take responsibility for that?

Speaker 13 When dateline continues

Speaker 1 Shortly after Justine Winter walked out of the courtroom in Kalispell, Montana, she landed more than 450 miles east across the state at the women's prison in Billings.

Speaker 1 She sat down with us, quite well aware of how all this time she'd been the target of so much curiosity and anger.

Speaker 1 I'm curious to know what your thought process was as you went about deciding, yeah, I think I'll talk now.

Speaker 10 I don't know, I guess it was probably that I was being

Speaker 10 shown in a different light than what I wanted to be shown in.

Speaker 1 When you

Speaker 1 read accounts of your case and

Speaker 1 when you see the comments people write, what is that like?

Speaker 10 They were really hard to read. I heard one that said I need to hang from a noose on a tree.

Speaker 1 What does it feel like inside when you when you saw that comment, for example?

Speaker 10 I'm really weird, and with my brain injury, I feel it in the second, but it's hard to recall it afterwards.

Speaker 1 That brain injury is the reason she says she sometimes smiles when she doesn't mean to. Why everything came out wrong, she says, when she took the stand and spoke at sentencing.

Speaker 1 And why she says, and even the prosecutor says he believes this. that she recalls nothing about the crash.

Speaker 10 I don't remember the night of the accident, but I remember events that I know had to have happened right before the accident happened.

Speaker 1 What events would those be?

Speaker 10 I remember doing stuff to get ready for prom,

Speaker 10 because prom was supposed to be two days after when the accident happened. But other than that, I don't really remember a whole lot about March.

Speaker 1 What do you remember of the last time you saw your boyfriend?

Speaker 10 I have no idea. I remember we spent

Speaker 10 oodles of time together.

Speaker 1 You were inseparable, basically.

Speaker 10 Pretty much.

Speaker 1 In love?

Speaker 1 Kid love. Yeah.
Well, it's pretty strong love, that kid love, isn't it?

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 I remember if I wasn't with him, I was texting him all the time.

Speaker 1 But as for those texts following the argument with Ryan just before the crash, Justine said, despite what many believe, she would never, ever have tried to kill herself, knowing, as she does, that her grandmother, Randy's mother, took her own life when her dad was just a boy.

Speaker 1 In fact, she said the most likely explanation was she was just playing a game of sorts with Ryan.

Speaker 10 He liked controlling everything, having to do with like my life.

Speaker 10 And he he'd

Speaker 10 he'd threatened suicide twice.

Speaker 10 That's what I would think was happening, is that I was playing his own card back at him.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm going to kill myself, then.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 10 I don't think that they were text messages that were to be taken seriously.

Speaker 1 Well, if you look at them through Justine's eyes, they don't look like a serious threat. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But the jury didn't look at it through your eyes.

Speaker 10 No.

Speaker 1 And despite her conviction and all that evidence and the fact she has no memory of that night, Justine still claims she must have been wearing her seatbelt and cannot imagine driving your car at 85 miles an hour.

Speaker 1 Just not the sort of thing she ever did, she says.

Speaker 1 Something Something happened, you swerved across and hit that other car. Does that sound about right?

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's probably you who caused the accident. That's fair to say.

Speaker 1 And if you say it's probably you who caused that accident, are you able to say, yeah, you know,

Speaker 1 if I did it, and I probably did cause it, I just feel horrible about that.

Speaker 1 And I take responsibility for that. Is it possible for you to say that?

Speaker 10 I mean, if I knew, then I would take responsibility for it. You know, if it was me, I'd take complete, utter responsibility for it.

Speaker 10 And

Speaker 10 I do.

Speaker 1 And now, finally, having said the words almost that Erin and Caden's family long to hear, Justine says she is finally through with what she called a pity party she held for herself.

Speaker 10 All I would change about the accident is that they lived.

Speaker 10 And if it had to be, so be that they lived and I didn't, I'd be okay with that.

Speaker 10 Because I don't

Speaker 10 I don't like seeing anyone else in pain.

Speaker 10 I know my family was put in a lot of pain because of the accident,

Speaker 10 but they've got to see me grow up

Speaker 1 and the other family can't see that.

Speaker 1 Yep.

Speaker 10 And I don't want to put them in any more pain than they've already had to be put through.

Speaker 10 And I want to make everything...

Speaker 10 everything okay for them

Speaker 1 after serving a little more than four years of her 15-year sentence in prison in 2015 Justine Winter was granted parole. For Aaron's widower, Jason, his dream is gone.

Speaker 1 Only an empty chair and empty ache remain, as he and so many in the family, as if climbing those Montana mountains, try to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

Speaker 3 It's a dance between the grief of their loss to the joy and the blessing of having experienced them.

Speaker 7 It's like seeing a meteor. You wouldn't curse your luck that you saw this meteor.
You'd just be thankful that you were blessed to see it. And so we just have to cling to that.

Speaker 1 Just that, wow,

Speaker 7 how amazing that we got to spend

Speaker 10 a good part of our life

Speaker 7 with two of the most precious people on the planet.

Speaker 5 That's all for now. I'm Lester Holt.
Thank you for joining us.

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