A preliminary breath test revealed that a Madison, Wis., man had a blood-alcohol content of 0.158 percent when he allegedly hit and killed two prospective University of Minnesota cheerleaders and a Century College student on a Wisconsin interstate last week.

Bradley R. Erickson, 31, faces three counts of homicide by drunken driving, according to a criminal complaint filed Tuesday that also details how one survivor narrowly escaped being struck himself.

The charges were filed a day after Erickson, trembling and crying, appeared in Dane County Circuit Court. Then, a judge set bond at $30,000 for the suspected repeat drunken driver. Erickson was silent.

According to the complaint, Erickson told a Dane County detective that he drank two beers and a shot of Jaegermeister during the evening before the crash, which occurred about 2:38 a.m. Thursday as the victims prepared to fix a flat tire just north of Madison.

Erickson said that he was returning home to Madison from a tree-cutting seminar in Marshfield, and remembered going around a semi-trailer when -- the next thing he knew -- "my airbags went off."

The car he struck was in the median shoulder.

The survivor, Carlos Rios, said that he was standing outside the victims' car with tire jack in hand when he saw lights coming toward him. Must be the police coming to help, he recalled thinking. When he realized the vehicle was going too fast, Rios shouted an alert to his friends and jumped over the median barrier.

He leaped back to find Marcus Johnson, 19, of Milwaukee, dead on the hood of Erickson's car. Wilfredo Ugarte, 23, of Puerto Rico, was unconscious and bleeding from his head, he said. Like Johnson, Ugarte was pronounced dead at the scene.

Elysia Rapp, 20, a first-year student at Century College in White Bear Lake, died about a half-hour later at University of Wisconsin Hospital.

Johnson, who was Rapp's boyfriend, had just won a spot on the University of Minnesota's Spirit Squad and was expected to enroll in classes starting in January, university spokesman Daniel Wolter said last week. Rios, the crash survivor, and Ugarte were cheer recruits who had not yet completed the tryout process.

The young people were headed to Milwaukee from Minnesota when the crash occurred.

The Associated Press contributed to this report. Anthony Lonetree • 612-673-4109