A drunk driver has been sentenced to a year in prison after he struck a nine-year-old boy who was leaving a San Francisco Giants game last year, according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle.
The man, 22-year-old Andrew Alan Vargas, appeared in court last week for sentencing and expressed his remorse to the family of the boy whom he struck with his pickup truck last August.
Before the crash occurred, young Ryan White was walking with his family back to their San Francisco hotel after watching a baseball game at AT&T Park. The Whites, who are from Yardley, Pennsylvania, had traveled to the Bay Area to watch their favorite team, the Philadelphia Phillies.
As a result of the accident, which was caused by Vargas’s misguided decision to drive the wrong way down a one-way street, Ryan White suffered a lacerated liver and a fractured pelvis.
The parents of the child, Ken and Roseanne White, were unable to attend the sentencing hearing because they had to stay in Philadelphia, where their son was undergoing his fourth surgery since the crash, sources indicate.
In a letter to the judge, however, the parents made pointed remarks to Vargas, claiming that he was “incarcerated because of [his] actions” but they also noted that their son was also incarcerated because of the man’s actions.
In their letter, the Whites said that Ryan’s injuries have rendered him unable to do all of his favorite physical activities, including swimming, bike riding, and performing martial arts.
To his credit, Vargas did apologize profusely, both to the judge and to Ryan White and his family, for his decision to drive under the influence of alcohol.
In his statements to the sentencing judge, Superior Court Judge Nancy Davis, Vargas claimed, “I have learned so much out of this, and I’m determined to turn things around for them and will do everything in my power to avoid others from making the same mistake that I committed.”
Interestingly, Ryan White’s parents supported Judge Davis’s decision to only sentence Vargas to a year in prison (sources suggest that, had she wanted to, the judge could have sentenced Vargas to a much lengthier prison term).
Sources say that the family gave their approval to a decision last month in which Vargas pleaded guilty to a felony DUI charge with great bodily injury. Charges related to a hit-and-run were dropped.
In the White family’s words, they did not want Vargas “to sit in jail forever and do nothing” because, from what they had heard, he was “a good young man.”
