
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 11, 1993                   TAG: 9306110250
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: B1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

DRIVER GETS 9 YEARS

Every time he hears the whistle of a freight train, Michael G. Reeves is tormented by the memory of how he drove a friend to his death.

"Nobody knows how it is unless you've been there . . . nobody knows how it is when I hear a train," Reeves said Thursday, minutes before he was sentenced to nine years in prison.

Reeves, who earlier pleaded guilty to drunken driving and involuntary manslaughter, was racing to beat a train to the Hollins Road crossing in Southeast Roanoke the night of Dec. 23.

Dennis J. Wright, one of two friends riding in Reeves' pickup truck that night, was killed when the truck ran through flashing lights and into the path of the approaching locomotive.

"It should have been me," to die that night, Reeves, 22, testified in a shaking voice.

On the night of the accident, Reeves, Wright and Wayne Hale had been drinking whiskey and playing cards, Hale testified in Roanoke Circuit Court.

As they headed home on a street that parallels the railroad tracks, Reeves pulled alongside a Norfolk Southern Corp. train pulling 106 cars.

Both Hale and Wright urged their friend to beat the train to the crossing so they wouldn't have to wait.

"We were saying: `Go! Go!' and he drove," Hale testified.

With its brakes screeching, the train slammed into Reeves' truck and pushed it 1,300 feet down the tracks before finally stopping.

The impact killed Wright, 39, on the scene and sent Reeves and Hale to hospitals with serious injuries.

"It was just like a boys' night out and we messed up," Hale testified. " . . . We'd done it plenty of other times."

Reeves, of Vinton, was so shaken during sentencing that court was recessed briefly after he vomited when a prosecutor presented photographs of the accident scene.

"Mr. Reeves clearly is already suffering," Assistant Public Defender Roger Dalton said in asking for leniency. "He's punished himself severely for what happened."

But Chief Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Betty Jo Anthony, citing Reeves' past criminal history, said his actions deserved a maximum 11-year term.

While calling Wright's death "totally avoidable and unexcusable," Judge Jack Coulter stopped short of imposing the maximum; in part, he said, because the victim's family did not make an appeal for harsh punishment.

Keywords:
FATALITY

by CNB