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A Los Angeles truck driver was charged with two counts of vehicular manslaughter in the deaths of two young sisters who were fatally struck in a crosswalk on their way to school.
Marlene Lorenzo, 14, and her sister Amy, 12, were walking to Clinton Middle School in South Los Angeles around 7:50 a.m. on April 4 when they were struck by 31-year-old Stanley Bernard Randle who was driving a double bottom dump truck that was making a right turn in the marked crosswalk.
Police say Randle was allegedly using his cellphone to look for music on YouTube before the incident.
“He stopped at a red light waiting to make a right turn so while he was stopped he was looking at YouTube music videos and when the light turns green he stops to look at the video and proceeds to make a right turn,” Detective Supervisor Moses Castillo of the Los Angeles Police Department’s Central Traffic Division tells PEOPLE. “He never saw the girls because he was looking at his YouTube videos.”
“Hopefully people will think twice about driving with their cellphone,” he adds. “That is what is so sad. It was a hundred percent preventable.”
Castillo says Randle stopped at the scene, attempted to render aid and called 911. There was no evidence that drugs or alcohol were a factor.
Marlene died at the hospital the same day. Amy died one month later, on April 22.
Castillo says the two sisters were A-plus honor roll students.
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SOURCE: PEOPLE, Christine Pelisek
