A man remains in a rehab facility awaiting indictment on charges that he was high on PCP and driving the wrong way when he struck and killed a mother and her teenage daughter.
Keith Johnson was allegedly driving his Dodge Durango 100 mph in the wrong direction when he struck a Honda Odyssey driven by Anada Medina at the intersection of Chapel and Russell Avenues in Merchantville, N.J. in January.
Medina, 36, and her 18-year-old daughter Stephanie Garcia, who was sitting in the passenger seat, both died from their injuries. The speed limit for the road is 25 mph.
Johnson and a passenger in his car, identified as Gervaise Pierre, were both hurt in the violent wreck.
Camden County Prosecutor Warren Faulk said in a press release that Johnson crossed into oncoming traffic right before the Jan. 31 wreck.
In 911 calls released following the crash, a caller describes the wreckage: “We saw the whole accident! Yeah, they are really hurt. This silver car came speeding out of nowhere and messed up (inaudible) on the wrong side of the road and everything.”
Prosecutors said that toxicology results showed that Johnson was on PCP, a drug the National Institute on Drug Abuse calls "dissociative," which distorts one’s perceptions of sight, sound and feeling.
As of Friday, Johnson, who hails from Pennsauken, was still recovering at a rehab facility, Camden County Prosecutor’s Office spokesman Jason Laughlin said.
Johnson is expected to be indicted on multiple charges including two counts of death by auto and a count of aggravated assault.
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Laughlin says it’s unclear when Johnson will be indicted and that the process could take months.
“He certainly felt remorse about the whole thing. You’d have to be not human not to,” Johnson's attorney Robert Simons said.
Garcia, a Cherry Hill High School West senior, was a writer for the school’s student newspaper. She wrote about her move to Cherry Hill Township just months earlier and how it gave her opportunities she had never received before.
Those opportunities were cut short by the crash that claimed Garcia and her mother’s life.
