ROCKVILLE, Md. — A man convicted of drunken driving was teary and remorseful at his sentencing Thursday. But 34-year-old Maximiliano Curcho of Clarksburg, Maryland, had been in this situation before.
This conviction, for causing a crash that prosecutors said nearly killed two EMTs, was Curcho’s third. The difference this time: he’s going to jail. Curcho was sentenced to 18 months, along with five years of supervised probation.
Montgomery County Assistant State’s Attorney Lauren Turner painted the picture: it was Feb. 15, 2015, not long after midnight. An icy, snowy, early morning crash along the Beltway brought a team of four EMTs from the Glen Echo Fire Department to the scene of a wreck on the Beltway near River Road. A white Toyota Corolla was stopped in the middle of the shoulder lane.
Turner said police crash reconstruction teams found Curcho was going as fast as 76 mph before losing control of his Ford F150 and slamming into the Toyota, then striking two of the four EMTs on the scene before finally coming to rest against the Jersey wall.
One of the EMTs, then 19-year-old Sydney Marshall, was thrown into the air and landed on the pavement near the passenger side of the Ford F150. The other EMT that was hit, then 26-year-old Thomas Schryver, was thrown over the hood of Curcho’s truck. He landed between the barrier wall and the Jersey barrier, unresponsive.
Two other EMTs watched in horror as their colleagues were tossed like ragdolls and seriously injured, Turner said. They had come to the scene to help others; now they were urgently contacting dispatch for assistance.
Turner said both of the young EMTs who were hit had suffered serious injuries: Schryver had a head injury — including an open skull fracture — that required extensive orthopedic and physical therapy. Marshall suffered a concussion — a hematoma that required surgery and extensive damage to her mouth. She suffered 10 broken teeth and had so many facial cuts that when Marshall asked how many stitches it had taken to close her wounds, a surgeon told her, “I can’t say — I lost count.”
Before he was sentenced, Curcho told a judge he wished he could turn back time and take back his decision to get behind the wheel after drinking.
Though Montgomery County Circuit Court Judge Cheryl McCally told Curcho she had no doubt he meant what he said, she also said it was a wish she had heard many times before from defendants in Curcho’s position.
“Clocks only go one way,” McCally said. “They go forward. They don’t go backward.”
Curcho was crying as he told the judge he was truly sorry for his actions. Turning to members of the Glen Echo Fire Department, he said he thought about the crash every day and prayed for the EMTs — not just the two that were injured, but the two that witnessed the trauma to their partners and then had to call for help.
“I have a great admiration for what you do,” he said. “I hope some day you will find it in your hearts to forgive me.”
Judge McCally told Curcho he had the right to drive, but he did not have the right to get in a vehicle “in a condition that makes you incapable of driving.”
Noting that he had two previous drunken driving convictions, and that this time he had two of his own children in the car with him — a 16-year-old and a 2-year-old — McCally told Curcho he was a threat to others on the road.
People have a right, she said, to get to where they are going “without being slammed into by a Ford F150.”
McCally also marveled at how Curcho had reached 76 mph when a state trooper told prosecutors that the conditions were so icy and snowy that night that he could not go above 15-20 mph without losing control of his patrol vehicle. McCally said Curcho’s actions were “tantamount to taking a gun, pointing it down the road and pulling the trigger to see what would happen.”
McCally then sentenced Curcho to three years — with all but 18 months suspended. He will also have to serve five years supervised probation, during which he will have to use an ignition interlock: a device that prevents drivers from being able to operate their car if they have been drinking.
John Witherspoon, president of the Glen Echo Fire Department, said the sentence offered “a sense of justice … that there is a price to be paid for this type of behavior.”
Witherspoon said both Schryver and Marshall “worked very hard to come back. They wanted to get medical clearance to ride again in the ambulance as quickly as they possibly could.”
He said the impact of that February crash has had ripple effects that reach the entire department.
“You may not be harmed by an event like this, but you will certainly never be the same,” he said.
