A man who killed a friend and seriously injured a woman while driving drunk to a casino in southwest Colorado has been convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 24 years in prison.
Timothy Amos Merritt, 56, had been convicted at trial for the death of Cecil Vijil Sr. and for severely injuring Sallie Vijil. Merritt. He will serve a 10-year prison term in connection to Sallie Vijil’s injuries concurrently to the murder charge.
Merritt’s public defenders had sought a six-year-prison sentence for Merritt based partly on the fact that he was burned over 70 percent of his body in a 1991 gas explosion and because of his anguish over killing a man he called “grandpa-son.”
Before the fatal crash, Merritt had been convicted three times for drunken driving between 2005 and 2016. In one of the cases, Merritt was arrested after he drove in the wrong direction on U.S. Highway 163, directly at Kayenta, Ariz., Police Officer Grant Kearns. Kearns testified that he saw Merritt vomiting out the window and tossing a beer can out the window before he arrested Merritt on Dec. 29, 2012.
On Aug. 3, 2016, Merritt got drunk and was driving his Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck to the Ute Mountain Casino in southwest Colorado. He was driving on Colorado 41, about a mile from the Utah border, when he crashed head on into the Vijil’s car. At the time, the Vijils were on their way home after celebrating a family member’s birthday.
The victim’s son, Creighton Vijil, was driving the family’s Buick Encore when he saw the pickup approaching on the wrong side of the road with no shoulders or guardrails on either side, court records say. Creighton Vijil stepped on the brakes and believing that the truck would go back into its own lane, stayed in the same lane until the last minute before swerving to the left. The truck struck the passenger side head on and drove it backwards 100 feet.
Sallie Vijil, whose shoulder and femur were crushed, was thrown between the two front seats, landing with her head almost on her husband’s lap. At Merritt’s trial, she testified that she “reached up to his face, touched him, talked to him, tried in vain to wake him.
Merritt’s blood-alcohol level was measured 3½ hours after the crash and it was 0.191, or more than twice the BAC at which a person is considered driving under the influence. He was largely uninjured. A data recorder showed that his foot was still on the truck’s accelerator at the time of the collision, court records say. Merritt acknowledged that he was on his way to the Ute Mountain Casino.
“The defendant’s actions that night were part of a pattern of behavior that neither started nor ended when he took a life,” Julia Martinez, assistant U.S. attorney, wrote in a pre-sentence report.
Three months after the fatal crash, Merritt was arrested for drunken driving for the fifth time. Arizona Highway Patrol Officer Rusty Smith was driving behind Merritt on Nov. 9, 2016, when Merritt’s car swerved from one side of the road to the other. Even though Smith was outside his jurisdiction at the time he pulled Merritt over after seeing him cross the center line and almost collide head on into a tractor-trailer truck, court records say. Merritt had a blood-alcohol reading of 0.2, or more than twice the legal limit.
A prison sentence for Merritt won’t bring Cecil Vijil Sr. back to life, Martinez wrote in the report, but it will stop him from driving drunk during his sentence.
“And it will send a clear message that repeated, callous, drunken driving will be severely punished,” she wrote.
