[B]URLINGTON – A prosecutor painted a picture of Steven Bourgoin as being in a rage over his financial struggles and child custody dispute with his ex-girlfriend when he drove his speeding pickup into a car while driving the wrong-way on Interstate 89, killing five teens.
“The scene that night was like a war zone,’” Susan Hardin, a Chittenden County deputy state’s attorney prosecuting the case, said Monday as opening arguments got underway in the case against the Williston man facing five counts of second-degree murder in the Oct. 8, 2016, crash in his hometown.
“People were walking around shell-shocked,” the prosecutor told the jury.
Robert Katims, an attorney representing Bourgoin, countered in his opening statement to the jury that his client does not dispute being behind the wheel of the pickup that crashed into the car the teens were in.
“This trial is about why he did,” Katims said, “what was going on in Steven Bourgoin’s head on that tragic night.”
The defense attorney said that his client believed he was on a mission from the government, which he thought had been sending him messages through the internet, his cell phone and his vehicle’s radio in the time leading up to the crash.
“Evidence will be that he was, in every sense, insane at the time of the crash,” Katims said, latter adding, “He is completely delusional and psychotic at the time of the crash. What he is seeing and hearing isn’t there.”
Those two views of the same crash and same man were presented to the jury Monday morning.
The emotional history of the case has included then-Gov. Peter Shumlin leading a vigil that drew nearly 1,000 people to remember the teens days after the crash occurred and raised questions about whether an impartial jury could be selected in the county where it happened.
The five students killed in the crash were Mary Harris, 16, and Cyrus Zschau, 16, both of Moretown; Liam Hale, 16, of Fayston; Eli Brookens, 16, of Waterbury; and Janie Chase Cozzi, 15, of Fayston.
Four of the students were attending Harwood Union High School in Duxbury. Cozzi was a student at Kimball Union Academy in New Hampshire.
In the courtroom
A packed courtroom, including many family and friends of the teens killed in the crash, watched the proceeding Monday inside the Chittenden County Superior criminal court in Burlington. The trial is expected to run at least two weeks.
Jurors will decide whether Bourgoin is guilty of five counts of second-degree murder in the death of the teens, as prosecutors allege, or if he was insane at the time of the crash, as Bourgoin’s attorney contends.
The jury includes 16 people, with 12 expected to decide the case and four who will later be named alternates. The 16 people includes 10 women and six men.
Bourgoin has been held without bail since his arrest immediately after the crash. He has pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, which could send him to prison for life if convicted.
He sat quietly at the defense table throughout Monday’s first day of the trial, making little eye contact with the jury who will decide his fate.
The five teenagers killed in the crash were on their way home from a concert at Higher Ground in South Burlington at about 11:50 p.m. on Oct. 8, 2016.
Bourgoin, heading northbound on I-89 South, crashed his Toyota Tacoma pickup into their car going an estimated 79 mph, police said.
Then, police said, Bourgoin stole a police cruiser from an officer who had arrived at the crash scene and jumped out his car to help the teenagers. Bourgoin drove south, before turning around and heading back to the scene, crashing into several stopped vehicles, police said.
Katims, in his statement to the jury Monday, said his client, after crashing into the teens’ vehicle, got out of his pickup and went to look at their car, still thinking that he was on government mission.
“He doesn’t see children there at all. He sees what he thinks are mannequins with breathing apparatuses,” Katims said. “He thinks this is a set up.” The attorney said that belief explained his client’s attempt to flee the scene in the police cruiser.
Earlier on Oct. 8, 2016, Bourgoin had sought help at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. However, he eventually left, according to court records filed in the case.
Hardin, the prosecutor, said in her opening statement to the jury, that Bourgoin, while at the hospital did not talk of paranoid thoughts, but spoke of the stress and anxiety he had been dealing with.
Katims said that’s not an unusual response from a person going through a mental health crisis.
“He says he just wants to be somewhere safe, he’s having trouble organizing his thoughts,” Katims said in his statement to the jury of client’s time at the medical center.
“He doesn’t say he’s paranoid, ‘I’m hearing things,’” Katims added. “Does a paranoid person say what they are paranoid about?”
Katims told the jurors an expert hired by the defense, as well as one hired by prosecution in the case, have determined that Bourgoin was legally insane at the time of the crash.
Hardin said to jurors that Bourgoin had been growing increasingly frustrated with his warehouse job at Lake Champlain Chocolates, which he quit a day before the crash, and he had also been dealing with financial problems.
A custody dispute with his ex-girlfriend, who is the mother of his child, also resulted in him only having one hour of supervised visitation a week with the child, the prosecutor said.
“Think about what he did before and after the crash,” Hardin told the jurors
She said medical professionals who provided care to Bourgoin, who was also injured in the crash, will be called to testify in the coming days, including one who helped with his rehabilitation.
“The defendant said to him, ‘I remember it all, before, during and after,’ but he wouldn’t elaborate any further,” the prosecutor said.
Hardin said testimony in the trial will describe the “lengths he will go to” when Bourgoin’s feeling angry, frustrated and stressed out.
As the trial opened Monday, Judge Kevin Griffin spoke to the jury, reminding them that whatever verdict they reach it must be unanimous.
“You are the sole judge of fact,” he told the jurors.
‘I expected not to survive’
Keith Porter of Montpelier, a witness called Monday by the prosecution, was in one of the first vehicles to come upon the initial crash scene. Porter said Bourgoin, who was outside of his pickup, briefly spoke to him.
“He said, ‘I don’t know what happened, I just lost control,’” Porter recalled Bourgoin telling him.
Porter said he left Bourgoin and went to see what he could do to help a Williston police officer who had arrived on scene.
Moments later, Porter said he saw a Williston police vehicle, which police later said Bourgoin had jumped into and drove away in, speeding back to the scene, traveling north in the southbound lane.
Porter said he saw the approaching police vehicle, and didn’t believe he was going to be able get out of its path.
“I expected not to survive,” Porter said. “I remember hoping it would be quick.”
He said he suffered a foot injury as well as many cuts and other abrasions when wreckage from that crash struck him.
Porter said he couldn’t figure out who could have been driving a cruiser in such a way into an emergency scene.
“We were trying to help,” Porter added. “I thought, ‘Who’s coming to hurt us?’”
Sue Jaynes, a nurse practitioner, also drove up on the crash scene and went down the embankment on the interstate where the teens’ vehicle had careened to a stop.
Jaynes testified Monday that she offered aid, along with another nurse who arrived at the scene, to one of the teens, Mary Harris, who had been ejected out of the vehicle. But despite their efforts at CPR, they could not resuscitate the teen.
Meanwhile, the doors to the vehicle with the other teens inside couldn’t be opened and the car was on fire.
“I didn’t know who was in the vehicle next to us, but I knew that life was passing,” Jaynes testified. “I feel strongly that the passing of all life is sacred and I felt obligation to just hold space because, really, that’s all I could do.”
Watch the prosecution’s full opening argument:
Watch the defense’s full opening argument:
