Wednesday, September 24, 2003

By Karen Kane, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Rosellen Clark Moller won't be the only person placing flowers on her son's grave on the second anniversary of his death next June.

	Annette and Glenn Clark hold a newborn niece in this family photo from June 2002, just days before the crash killed Clark and put his wife in a coma.

There'll be a bundle from the Butler County woman who caused the traffic accident that killed Glenn Clark and injured his wife, Annette, so severely that she is now in what doctors believe is an irreversible coma.

Jennifer Dawn Langston will bring the flowers because she has to. She's required by the terms of her probation to personally deliver them to Glenn Clark's grave and to the accident site on the anniversary of his death every year for the next five years.

The floral commemorations are part of an unconventional "shaming" penalty fashioned by the Butler County district attorney's office and the victims' families designed to make sure Langston is compelled to confront the devastation she caused.

"She shouldn't be able to just forget," said Moller.

The conditions require the 27-year-old Langston to provide a $50 a-month-stipend to the Clarks' 10-month-old son, Michael Anthony, who was delivered from his mother's comatose body. He is being raised by Annette's sister and brother-in-law, Michelle and Matthew Phillips of Saxonburg.

Langston, who lives in the small Butler County town of Cabot with her two young children and her boyfriend, also must carry a picture of Glenn, 38, and Annette, 34, in her wallet at all times.

She'll be required to spend eight hours each month either working with trauma victims or speaking to community groups about the dangers of irresponsible and drunken driving.

She'll be barred from taverns and clubs serving alcohol, and she must send letters of apology to Glenn's and Annette's families and to the staff, students and administrators of Mars Area High School, where Glenn was a much-admired wrestling coach and physical education teacher.

The shaming sentence is a first for Butler County and, according to Mark Bergstrom, executive director of the Pennsylvania Commission on Sentencing, one of only a few in the state.

"Certain cases just seem to cry out for this," he said.

The conditions of Langston's five-year probation are in addition to a 30-day jail sentence she'll serve after her formal sentencing, which has not yet been scheduled by Butler County Judge George Hancher. She'll also be under house arrest for six months.

They're all part of an agreement reached before Hancher Monday. Langston pleaded guilty to homicide by vehicle, reckless endangerment, reckless driving and driving at an unsafe speed. The district attorney's office agreed not to prosecute her additionally should Annette Clark die.

Langston declined comment yesterday through her attorney, Mark Sherman.

The accident occurred last June 15 when Langston lost control of her pickup truck along rural Neupert Road in Jefferson, Butler County, and crashed head-on into a car driven by Glenn Clark of Saxonburg. Langston admitted afterward she had been drinking and was talking on a cell phone.

She was charged with homicide by vehicle while driving drunk, drunken driving, involuntary manslaughter, aggravated assault by vehicle while driving drunk and assorted traffic violations. Conviction on all counts would have brought a mandatory three years in jail and more.

But District Attorney Tim McCune didn't believe he would be able to prove in court that Langston was drunk. Nearly two hours elapsed between the crash and the time that Langston's blood alcohol level was tested, making the reading unreliable.

McCune knew he had a weak case.

"We were warned within a couple weeks that we were looking at very little jail time -- probably between two and six months," recalled Moller, of Greenville, Mercer County. "It was hard to accept but it boiled down to the law and that was what the DA had to work with."

That's when one of the family mentioned that Langston should have to carry a physical reminder with her of the tragedy.

"It clicked for me," said assistant District Attorney Todd Eberle, who was prosecuting the case. He said he and McCune believed they could "better satisfy the victims' families and the community" by attaching some conditions to Langston's probation.

Eberle said the families' wanted the defendant "to come face-to-face with their loss and to have that with her for more than a minimal time in jail and house arrest."

The flowers, the picture and the community service will do that, he said. "They're more than a series of difficult tasks the defendant doesn't want to do. She'll be giving something back to the community in terms of her community service and she'll be helped in her rehabilitation," he said.

Though flowers, pictures and monthly stipends may be unconventional as conditions of probation, Bergstrom said they're entirely legal. He said the state's sentencing guidelines gives courts broad authority to attach as a condition of probation any measure that "reasonably relates to rehabilitation."

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