Franco says she wasn't driving: 'I told him to stop'

WILLMAR, MINN. - Just before the deadly collision, Olga Franco could see the Cottonwood school bus crash coming, she told a Kandiyohi County jury Tuesday.

She testified that she was a passenger in her boyfriend's minivan and that he was driving them to work the frigid afternoon of Feb. 19. They were arguing, she said, and she saw the school bus as they hurtled toward a highway intersection.

"I told him to stop," she testified in a soft but firm voice, her words translated by an interpreter. "I tried to open the door. I tried to get out." But she didn't make it, she said, and when the vehicles collided and air bags in the van popped, she landed partially into the driver's seat and fully into a legal case that has her facing criminal charges for the death of four children and the injuries of 17 others.

The Guatemalan woman took the stand for more than two hours Tuesday in her own defense, giving a strikingly detailed version of how the crash happened and pointing blame at her boyfriend, Francisco Sangabriel Mendoza, who hasn't been found.

Her account remained mostly consistent under cross-examination, though she repeatedly denied remembering giving statements to authorities who interviewed her in the hospital that night.

Her statements on the stand were followed by testimony from a crash engineering expert who studied the collision at the defense's request. He said that if the van's occupants weren't wearing seat belts, the van's spin after impact would have caused the passenger to end up in the driver's seat, and the driver ejected out of the van if the driver's door had flown open.

Franco's defense team rested its case late Tuesday afternoon. Prosecutors are expected to call two rebuttal witnesses this morning, and the jury is expected to begin deliberations after both sides give closing arguments.

Under questioning from defense attorney Manuel Guerrero, Franco's testimony covered a wide range of her history, starting with her leaving rural Guatemala three years ago, and paying a "coyote" to ride through Mexico with 18 people hidden under piles of wood, then crossing into the United States through Arizona.

She described paying for false identification documents, then living and working at various places in Minnesota.

Boyfriend said to be abusive

Franco's testimony allowed her defense team to bring up her allegations of physical abuse at the hands of her boyfriend -- a subject cut short through objections when her counselor testified Monday.

Tearful at times, Franco described Mendoza as jealous and controlling. Two months after they started dating, Franco testified, Mendoza broke her cell phone because he didn't like friends and relatives calling her. A month later he made her quit her job at the Jennie-O plant in Willmar where they both worked, she said, and she then spent her days locked up at home for a few months.

She said Mendoza hit her because she liked to wear pants and he didn't like that. After moving in with him, she found out he was married and argued with him about it, but she didn't leave, she said, because she loved him. "He always said if I broke up with him, my life would be at risk," she said.

Franco, 24, said she and Mendoza, who both worked at a cabinet factory in Cottonwood in February, didn't go to work the day before the crash because Mendoza wasn't feeling well and she didn't drive.

The next day, she said, they argued about photos she had found of his wife, and the clothes Franco was wearing. After the crash, she said, Mendoza tried to get her out but couldn't. He told her not to tell anyone he was driving, she said, then fled because he didn't want to be deported to Mexico.

In his cross-examination of Franco, Lyon County Attorney Rick Maes carefully posed questions about details of the crash and her life, some of which raised questions about discrepancies.

No memory of van spinning

Franco said she didn't remember the van spinning, though crash experts testified that it spun after impact. And Franco said her boyfriend climbed in and out of the car to try to help her through the passenger window. Emergency workers responding to the scene testified last week that the van's sliding door window was broken. One paramedic recalled the passenger's window being intact.

Maes also asked about several statements Franco gave to authorities the night of the crash, in which she is alleged to have told people she was driving, according to transcripts. With each question, she repeated that she didn't remember any of it.

Maes also asked Franco about her testimony that she had tried learning to drive in her sister's car in Montevideo but was ticketed for driving too slow. Later in the day, Maes called a Montevideo police officer to the stand, who testified about citing Franco in 2006, who was using an alias, because she had no driver's license. He stopped her after getting a call from a resident about her erratic driving. The resident claimed a car had driven on the boulevard, he said.

Much of the afternoon's testimony came from defense witness Donn N. Peterson, a consulting mechanical engineer who specializes in forensic study of crashes.

He said, after looking at the state reconstruction report and examining and measuring the vehicles, the van didn't hit the school bus at a right angle, but instead followed the trajectory of the intersection, which is not a right angle.

The van's right bumper hit the bus first, then slid with the bus before spinning clockwise about three-quarters of a revolution, he said. He found no evidence that the seat belts had been locked, he said. And people not wearing seat belts in the front would continue moving in the original direction of the van on impact, while the van would spin around them until something in the vehicle stopped their movement.

If the driver's door flew open on impact, he said, the driver would have been ejected and the passenger would have ended up in the drivers's seat. Airbags slow the movements of people's heads and shoulders, he said, but the lower body would continue moving unless something was in the way. The van had no center console, and there was a "wide open space" between the two front seats, he pointed out.

Pam Louwagie • 612-673-7102