The Clark County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office has dismissed two counts of witnessing tampering against the mother of a Vancouver motorist who had fled after striking and killing two women in a crosswalk on Vancouver Mall Drive in January 2014.
Linda Diane Smith, 64, of Vancouver was accused of contacting at least two witnesses and telling them not to talk to police during the investigation into whether her son, Brandon Smith, was the driver in the fatal hit-and-run collision. She had been scheduled to be tried on the charges Monday.
Brandon Smith was sentenced Dec. 12 to more than eight years in prison for the crash.
(Linda Smith is not the former 3rd District congresswoman of the same name.)
According to court records, Senior Deputy Prosecutor Kasey Vu dismissed the charges against Linda Smith on Jan. 22.
“The defendant’s conduct that led to the criminal charges was a de minimis (trivial) violation of the law and … there is little deterrent purpose served by this prosecution,” Vu wrote in court papers.
Vu was out of the office Friday and not available for comment, according to an automatic reply from his work email account. He also did not immediately return a phone call Friday from The Columbian seeking more details about the dismissal.
Vu has said in the past that witnesses in the case, including Linda Smith and Brandon Smith’s live-in girlfriend, Kalista Jane Andino, were persistently uncooperative and slowed the investigation.
Andino also was arrested on suspicion of witness tampering in January 2014 by allegedly telling her cousin, Celeste Mady, “not to talk to the police,” according to a court affidavit.
Mady later changed her account of events, telling attorneys in the case that Andino actually said: “You don’t have to talk to police,” Vu has said.
As a result of the change in Mady’s wording, Vu dismissed the charge against Andino on June 10.
“There’s a difference in term and emphasis,” Vu said at the time. “We now don’t have sufficient evidence to go forward.”
Mady also was the source for one of the two counts of witness tampering charges against Linda Smith, said Smith’s defense attorney, Gerry Wear.
“In the other witness tampering charge, the witness held to her statement, but there were questions about (the witness’s) motivation,” Wear said.
He said the dismissal of charges against Linda Smith was not part of an agreement with prosecutors in which Brandon Smith pleaded guilty to vehicular homicide in December. Wear said he asked Vu to dismiss the charges because the case against Linda Smith was weak from the outset.
“The bottom line is, it wasn’t worth branding her with a felony for asserting her rights,” Wear said. “From the state’s perspective, she just didn’t use the right words in asserting her rights.”
While on their way home from a baby shower Jan. 19, 2014, Raisa Mosh, 45, and Irina Gardinant, 28, were killed at about 8 p.m. when Brandon Smith’s white 2007 Toyota Tacoma pickup struck them in a crosswalk at Northeast 72nd Avenue and Vancouver Mall Drive, according to court records.
He drove away without calling 911 or stopping to help the victims. Mosh’s 12-year-old son also was injured in the collision and was treated and released from the hospital.
Investigators initially had no major leads in identifying the driver who killed the women except for parts from Brandon Smith’s truck that were found at the scene.
A break in the case came when detectives located and seized Brandon Smith’s white pickup with front-end damage from the Larkspur Place Apartments on Vancouver Mall Drive, where Smith lived with Andino and their then-5-month-old daughter.
Child Protective Services briefly took custody of their baby when Andino and Linda Smith were arrested in January 2014 on the witness tampering charges. Andino later regained custody of the child.
Both immigrants from Moldova, Mosh and Gardinant had met at a church in their native country and continued their friendship in the United States, according to their friends.
Mosh was a mother of four, and Gardinant was a Sunday school teacher and mother of a 2-year-old daughter.
