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Published June 05, 2008 11:31 pm - GALENA, Mo. — A Stone County jury Thursday night convicted Carthage teenager Jarub R. Baird of second-degree involuntary manslaughter and second-degree assault in a traffic accident that took the life of 15-year-old Hannah Smallwood and injured two other Carthage Senior High School students. At issue in the two-day trial was the speed of the car Baird, 18, was driving Dec. 8, 2006, when it crashed along County Road 120 near Carthage, and whether he had shown conscious disregard for the lives and well-being of the other occupants of the vehicle by driving at an excessive rate of speed on an icy road. Jury convicts teen in fatality accident By Jeff Lehr jlehr@joplinglobe.com GALENA, Mo. — A Stone County jury Thursday night convicted Carthage teenager Jarub R. Baird of second-degree involuntary manslaughter and second-degree assault in a traffic accident that took the life of 15-year-old Hannah Smallwood and injured two other Carthage Senior High School students. At issue in the two-day trial was the speed of the car Baird, 18, was driving Dec. 8, 2006, when it crashed along County Road 120 near Carthage, and whether he had shown conscious disregard for the lives and well-being of the other occupants of the vehicle by driving at an excessive rate of speed on an icy road. Baird was tried on charges of first-degree manslaughter in the death of Smallwood and first-degree assault in the injury of Colby Johnson, but the jury exercised its option to reduce the charges in its finding of guilty. Judge Gayle Crane of Jasper County Circuit Court ordered a pre-sentence investigation and designated Aug. 14 as the date for sentencing. The car left the roadway, sheared a utility pole off at its base, slammed through a barbed-wire fence line and rolled about the length of a football field before coming to rest on its side in a snow-covered field. Three of the four teenagers in the Mazda Millenia, including Baird, who was 17, were not wearing seat belts and were thrown from the vehicle. Smallwood, who was sitting in the back seat with boyfriend Johnson, then 16, was thrown through the car’s windshield and died at the scene. Johnson suffered a brain injury, a broken femur and three broken bones in a hand. Baird walked away with minor injuries. Calee Houlihan, who was sitting in the front passenger seat and had put on her seat belt moments before the crash, also suffered only minor injuries. The prosecution maintained that the car was traveling at least 100 mph when it left the roadway. Johnson and Houlihan both testified that they had glanced at the car’s speedometer before the crash and saw the gauge reading 110 mph. A Missouri State Highway Patrol accident reconstruction expert, Lt. Albert Brown, calculated that the vehicle was traveling at least 99 mph when it left the road. “He’s doing that at nighttime,” Assistant Jasper County Prosecutor Kimberly Fisher told jurors. “He’s doing that when just a few minutes (earlier), he had been on ice. He knew there was a substantial risk of ice.” Baird’s attorneys argued that their client had volunteered to drive the vehicle that night because the others had been drinking and he had not. He offered to be their designated driver and actually prevented Houlihan from driving under the influence, attorney Phil Glades said. Glades said it was logically inconsistent to believe that Baird would offer to serve as designated driver only to then put all their lives at risk by deliberately driving in a reckless manner. While Baird may have been going too fast when he hit a patch of ice on the road, he did not display a conscious disregard for the other teens’ lives, the defense lawyer said. The defense also called the Highway Patrol expert’s calculations of the speed of the car into question by calling two expert witnesses of their own to dispute his methods and findings. 
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