POMONA (CNS) - A young man who was convicted of charges stemming from a high-speed crash in Hacienda Heights that killed a woman and injured her two sons was sentenced today to five years and four months in state prison.
Aron Petrosian Jr., now 23, was initially sentenced to 10 years in state prison after being convicted of one count of vehicular manslaughter and two counts of reckless driving on a highway causing injury involving the Dec. 17, 2014, crash that killed Bertha Alicia Rosales.
A state appeals court panel subsequently vacated sentencing enhancements that had added time to the reckless driving charges, ruling last July that Petrosian was impermissibly punished twice because the counts already accounted for the degree of injury to the victims.
Rosales, 42, was making a left turn on Halliburton Road when Petrosian's 2012 Chevrolet Camaro SS smashed into her BMW 328i.
Petrosian was arrested in April 2015 after an investigation that included obtaining a search warrant for the Camaro's air bag computer module to confirm the car's speed prior to the impact, according to the CHP. He was subsequently released on bond, but taken into custody again after the jury's November 2018 verdict.
The airbag control module in the Camaro revealed that Petrosian had accelerated the vehicle to 103 mph just one second before the impact and that he moved his foot from the accelerator to the brake pedal in the next half-second, according to the appellate court panel's ruling last July.
The appellate court justices noted in their ruling that a California Highway Patrol officer opined that Petrosian's speed at the time of the impact was 81 to 83 mph. He had been pulled over on the freeway just over five months earlier for speeding in excess of 80 mph and for making “aggressive'' lane changes, according to the ruling.
Jurors deadlocked on a murder charge against Petrosian, who was just shy of 18 years old at the time of the crash. The murder count was dismissed at Petrosian's sentencing in January 2019.
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