Repeat DWI offender gets 50 years for deadly Arlington crash

A repeat DWI offender whose 2009 crash in Arlington led to the death of a young boy was sentenced to 50 years in prison Wednesday morning.

Stewart Richardson admitted to driving the Ford pickup that plowed into the rear of a family’s 2003 Honda Accord while it was stopped at a red light at Oak Village Boulevard and South Cooper Street in Arlington.

Richardson, 51, pleaded guilty in June to three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, intoxicated assault and DWI felony repetition in connection with the Feb. 20, 2009, collision that put Abdallah Khader into a persistent vegetative state. Abdallah died in January this year.

Abdallah’s mother, Loubna Elharazin, told Richardson that “the family got death, you got life,” after he was sentenced.

State District Judge George Gallagher sentenced Richardson to 50 years in prison for aggravated assault and intoxicated assault and 20 years on the felony DWI charge, which will run concurrently.

Richardson had accumulated 22 alcohol-related convictions in four states before the 2009 crash, according to evidence presented at trial. Lab results from the Tarrant County medical examiner’s office showed that Richardson’s blood alcohol level was 0.25, more than three times the legal limit, Richard Alpert, Tarrant County prosecutor said.

On Tuesday, Elharazin testified that she still sleeps in her son’s room and has nightmares about the day of the crash.

“Since he died, I’ve maybe slept in my own room three or four times,” Elharazin said Tuesday.

Abdallah, who had learned words in three different languages by the time of the wreck, never recovered from the injuries he suffered in the collision, his relatives testified Tuesday. Elharazin said she moved into her son’s room to make it easier for her to manage his care, which was time- and labor-intensive.

Abdallah had to be moved periodically so that he would not develop bedsores, had a strict medication regimen, had daily physical therapy needs and during his final two years, became ill enough to require hospital stays every two to three weeks, family members testified.

“Every day for the last six years, I felt like this man haunted me in my sleep,” Elharazin told the court. “I felt like I needed to hurt this man because he hurt my son.

“I wanted to come here. I wanted to see the other side of Mr. Richardson. I wanted to give him a chance so that maybe I can have some sympathy for him. But I didn’t see that. His own brother did not have a relationship with him.”

The parents testified that it was difficult for them to accept the diagnoses they continually received: That Abdallah would never recover, never get better, that even though he was alive, their son was lost to them.

Elharazin said she would hold him in her arms and spin him in a circle and see him smile, but the doctors would say it was not a conscious response, but a shift in weight.

Richardson’s defense attorneys agreed with testimony from one doctor that was read into the record who said there was never any evidence that Abdallah could see or feel or move his limbs independently.

“As parents we didn’t really want to understand,” Elharazin said. “We wanted to do everything right for our son and for God.”

Abdallah’s half-brother, Ghazi Khader, who was 17 at the time of the collision, testified that he blacked out right after impact, but remembered being in the back seat that was rolled over by the oversized tires on Richardson’s truck.

Alpert and Joshua Ross are prosecuting, while Richardson is being represented by William “Bill “ Ray and Jerry Wood.

This story was originally published July 28, 2015 at 2:46 PM with the headline "Repeat DWI offender gets 50 years for deadly Arlington crash."