A Crown Point woman got a 5-year split sentence Friday in a deadly Winfield crash.
Christine Mefford, 47, pleaded guilty in July to reckless homicide and criminal recklessness.
She will serve three years in prison and another two in Lake County Community Corrections.
Winfield Police were called July 4, 2023, to the 7000 block of E. 117th Avenue.
A witness said Mefford, driving a Subaru Outback, tried to pass a Jeep on a two-lane highway and hit 19-year-old Grace Norris in a Kia Optima head-on. The area was hilly with blind spots where it was hard to see opposing traffic, according to the affidavit.
Norris died. Her younger sister, Emma Norris, and her friend, both 13, were hospitalized.
At the court hearing Friday, accident reconstructionist Stephan Neese told defense lawyer Mike Woods that he believed the Jeep was speeding up slightly – possibly to prevent Mefford from passing him – just before the crash.
Corey Cilek, Mefford’s partner of 15 years, a construction worker, told the court she spent over two weeks in an ICU following the crash and never returned to work as a nurse.
One of their children needs extra attention and has made “leaps and bounds” since she has stayed home with him, which he provided as a reason she should not go to prison due to various injuries.
“The important thing is to do what’s best for the kids,” Cilek said.
Susan Norris, Grace’s aunt, said she heard that her brother’s “scream of anguish” was the worst thing “anyone had heard.”
“None of this makes sense,” she said.
Her niece was a “goof” and a giving person, a natural to become a nurse one day.
Jake Norris, Grace’s father, said on the stand that she was a “beautiful soul” and volunteered to work in a nursing home in high school. At 16, she became a CNA and seemed destined for that career.
“I want to be a nurse. Nothing is going to stop me,” she said, he recalled.
July 4th was her favorite holiday. She volunteered to take her younger sister Emma to pick up friends to bring back to their party.
I know you’re a parent, he told Mefford. When they hadn’t heard from her, the family used a location tracker only to find the crash scene and coroner’s van.
“I wanted to die to be with her,” Jake said, adding he had to be “pried from the scene.”
For months, he could “barely move” and struggled to “function as a father.”
“I miss her every day,” he said.
He asked for a maximum sentencing, noting a six-year maximum was “disgusting.”
Woods argued for Mefford to avoid prison, saying no sentence would bring the victim back. The question was, how do we make this right?
“We can’t,” he said.
Mefford tried to pass someone in a “fit of frustration” to get home from work. It was not an intentional act. Her child needed her, particularly in the next few years.
He cited a July 2023 interview with WGN where Jake Norris appeared to be more forgiving toward Mefford.
“From the grace of God, I don’t look at it like that,” he said in the story. “I take the stance of, ‘We are all human, we all make mistakes.’ She didn’t leave her house trying to kill my daughter. I don’t want her to go to jail, I think the guilty feeling a good-standing moral person would feel after causing this accident is punishment enough.”
Woods noted he was “entitled to feel different later.”
Deputy Prosecutor Keith Anderson said the case was about “bad decision-making.”
How did she value human lives? A minute? Five minutes? She wouldn’t have gotten home much faster, he said. Driving was a social contract.
“We are all driving deadly weapons,” he said. “You can easily kill someone.”
He argued Mefford’s case was worse than other reckless drivers like Lisa Damico – a reckless driver with epilepsy, the first of two fatal driving cases Anderson lost – or a drunk driver like Santiago Marquez.
It was worse because Mefford wasn’t drunk, so she should have made better driving decisions, Anderson said.
Woods countered it was a “snap” decision and he didn’t know the details behind those cases.
Mefford cried heavily at points as she apologized in court.
“I let my anger at the car in front of me to take over,” she said.
“I have a daughter, too,” she said at one point. “I get it.”
Judge Salvador Vasquez said both sides lost in the case.
He gave Mefford consecutive sentences because there were multiple victims. Mefford drove the hilly road every day. Ultimately, she couldn’t blame the driver she was passing. She “made the decision.”
After the hearing, Jake Norris said at the time he spoke to WGN just after the crash, he was just grateful to have his younger daughter alive.
A few days later, “things changed” in the hospital when he saw her “trying just to stand up.”
“That was the switch,” he said.
“We’re forgiving people,” his ex, Lisa Norris, Grace’s mom, said.
Jake noted his girlfriend’s 17-year-old son Shaun Kikkert died in a DeMotte crash seven months after Grace.
Mefford had “crocodile tears” in court, he said, and several members of Norris’ family believed she called her “Gabby,” not Grace.
Family said Emma Norris, now 16, has finally started to improve emotionally, particularly in the last three or six months. She returned to cheerleading last year, but still has rods in her arm and leg.
Lisa said she had a “sense of calm” with the sentence.
It was the “best we could hope for” given the lower sentencing range, Jake said.
They and Emma’s friend’s parents have a scholarship in Grace’s name at Lowell High School. Grace’s parents are planning another at Kankakee Valley, they said.
mcolias@post-trib.com
