By Dan Sullivan
Tampa Bay Times
PINELLAS COUNTY, Fla. — A judge sentenced a former construction worker who admitted that he fled after running over a Pinellas County sheriff’s deputy with a front-end loader to 12 years in prison Tuesday, punctuating an emotionally charged criminal case that became a flashpoint in the national controversy over immigration.
Juan Molina-Salles, a Honduran immigrant who was in the U.S. illegally, pleaded guilty last month to leaving the scene of a collision that killed Deputy Michael Hartwick.
“You ran from what you did,” Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Pat Siracusa told Molina-Salles. “The person that died is a person that would have run to what you did. You did the exact opposite of what the deputy would have done. You ran away because you got scared, and I have to punish you today.”
Molina-Salles, 34, clutched tissues and wept as he listened to a Spanish translation of Tuesday’s testimony. Spectators, many of them law enforcement officers, packed each of seven rows of courtroom benches behind him.
The construction company Archer Western-de Moya Group Joint Venture drew scrutiny for employing Molina-Salles and several of his co-workers, none of whom were legally authorized to work in the U.S.
Molina-Salles was using the false name of Victor Vasquez. He and several of his co-workers face federal charges related to their use of fake identities.
Hartwick was working off-duty the night of Sept. 22, 2022, helping to direct traffic at a construction site for the Gateway Expressway, along Interstate 275 near Roosevelt Boulevard. He had stepped out of his patrol car and was standing near the road’s shoulder when Molina-Salles, operating a front-end loader, drove up at about 20 mph and ran over him.
Molina-Salles kept driving.
One of his co-workers, Allan Gomez-Zelaya , who was driving a truck behind the loader, took the witness stand Tuesday and testified through a Spanish interpreter. His voice quavered as he recalled seeing an object in the road and thinking it was a trash bag.
“I looked and I saw that it was a body,” he said. “I stopped. I got out. I didn’t touch the body because I saw that the body was not moving. It wasn’t alive.”
He spoke with Molina-Salles moments later by phone and told him he’d hit a police officer.
“He went in shock and started crying,” he said.
Molina-Salles met up with another co-worker, who took his hard hat and construction vest, before taking off on foot. An overnight manhunt ensued. Deputies found him the next morning, muddy and wet, hiding in nearby brush.
State prosecutors played a video from a body-worn camera that recorded the moments that Cpl. Brian Hirschman responded to a call of a fellow deputy who needed help.
The footage showed Hirschman dashing over a concrete barrier and across the interstate lanes, where cars sped along. Lurid pulses of light from a fire truck and emergency vehicles illuminated the ground where Hartwick lay with his face against the asphalt.
“I got a deputy down,” Hirschman said into a radio. “We need to shut this road down.”
Hirschman pulled Hartwick’s gun from its holster before paramedics turned him on his back.
“I got no pulse,” someone said.
A fire lieutenant approached Hirschman. He whispered something. The deputy began to quietly sob.
Seated behind prosecutors in the courtroom’s first row, Hartwick’s mother, Barbara Newman, wept as the video played.
Photographs displayed in court showed the back of Hartwick’s uniform shirt with white tire-tread marks running across it. His entire torso was crushed.
The loader weighed more than 30,000 pounds.
Detective John Syers, who investigated the case as a homicide, testified that Molina-Salles spoke with him and another detective after his arrest. He said Molina-Salles told him he had not noticed he had hit the deputy. The detective, who had experience operating heavy equipment in the military, did not believe him.
“It’s not reasonable to me to believe you could hit a man-sized object and not notice,” Syers said.
The detective’s analysis of videos from nearby semitrucks and GPS data from the loader indicated that he’d stopped driving for about two minutes after the collision. During that time, he made a call to Gomez-Zelaya.
Prosecutors asserted that Molina-Salles fled because he feared deportation. A Border Patrol agent testified that about two years before the deputy’s death, he’d been turned away while trying to enter the country in Texas.
Assistant State Attorney Elizabeth Constantine said that Molina-Salles’ actions reflected a lack of respect for the law.
“The defendant in this case expressed no concern for anyone out there that night, least of all Deputy Hartwick,” Constantine said.
The defense presented testimony from his family members, who spoke by videoconference from Spain. They described a hardworking man who grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Honduras . He dropped out in his second year of high school and started working part time in construction, a trade he learned from his father.
He has a wife, a daughter and a son. He left his native country about 10 months before he got in trouble, when the economy turned bad. He lived with a brother in Tennessee, working construction, and sent money to his family in Honduras .
He’d worked for Archer Western for about three months.
Gomez-Zelaya and another co-worker, Laura Caudill, said the flashing lights atop the deputy’s patrol cruiser made it difficult to see. Hartwick was in full uniform, but did not wear a reflective safety vest, making it harder to see him at the construction site, the witnesses testified.
Hirschman said the agency’s policy does not require deputies to wear vests unless they are directing traffic.
His sister, Juana Molina-Salles, said her brother called her within a day of his arrest. She later spoke with him periodically by phone.
She was asked how her brother was emotionally when she talked with him.
“Destroyed,” she said.
Molina-Salles chose to let the judge decide his sentence after efforts to negotiate a deal with the state failed. He pleaded guilty last month with the understanding that the maximum penalty he could receive would not exceed 20 years in prison. State prosecutors objected to that sentencing cap, having sought a sentence closer to the 30-year maximum.
While not excusing his conduct, defense attorneys emphasized the accidental nature of the collision and Molina-Salles’ lack of knowledge about the possible consequences.
They asked for a sentence between the four-year minimum mandatory penalty and the 10 years suggested by state guidelines.
“There is no dispute that this is a terrible, tragic accident,” Assistant Public Defender Maria DeLiberato said. “But if he had turned around and walked back, he would not have been charged with a crime.”
Before he was sentenced, Molina-Salles stood and read from a prepared statement.
“I am very sorry for leaving the scene of the accident where Deputy Hartwick died,” he said. “I was afraid. Not because I was afraid of being deported, but because I was afraid that no one would believe me or understand that it had been an accident. I just needed time to think and pray so I ran and hid. ... I know I should have waited, that it was wrong to leave, and I would like to be able to take it back.”
After he is released from prison, Molina-Salles will be deported. He said he will not return.
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