UC Santa Cruz student sentenced to 6 years for fatal Highway 1 Crash

UPDATE 3/23/2018 4:35 p.m.: A former U.C. Santa Cruz student has been sentenced for her role in a deadly car crash. Lynnea Hernandez will spend six years in prison for the deaths of two people and injuries to two others. The sentencing comes two years to the week of that crash.

It was on March 21, 2016 that Lynnea Hernandez was driving her Lexus SUV with six of her friends along Highway 1, heading down to Big Sur for Spring Break. A Snapchat video showed the girls dancing, singing and passing around a marijuana pipe. Prosecutors say just minutes later, Hernandez crossed into the oncoming lane near Castroville and crashed into another car.

The driver of the other car, Nikolas Malliarodakis, was killed instantly. A passenger in Hernandez’s car, Lillian Scott, later died. Hernandez pleaded guilty to two counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence in the deaths of Malliarodakis and Scott and two counts of reckless driving causing injury to several of her passengers.

On Friday, Hernandez addressed the court at sentencing, but not the victims’ families directly.

“I cannot face them and I can’t even look at their faces today. I’m ashamed,” Hernandez said in court.

The family was there, and in emotional testimony, they told Judge Julie Culver how much they missed Nikko.

“I, the very person, the one person that gave such a beautiful baby his very first breath of life, for the person to take his very last breath of life owes me,” said Nikko’s mother, Veronica Ramirez.

At one point, she was overcome with emotion and had to leave the courtroom. We spoke to her after Hernandez was sentenced to six years in prison.

“It’s not right,” Ramirez said. “We’re sentenced to life. I wake up in agony, I go to sleep in agony. I’m sentenced for life and what do I do? What do I do? My son is my son. I carry him with me everywhere. I think of him every second of my life and six years in comparison to what we’re sentenced with, we’re sentenced for life.”

Hernandez’s attorney said she is remorseful and has written letters of apologies to the victims’ families.

“Her total remorse for having caused two families to lose dear loved ones,” John Coniglio explained, “So she was abundantly aware of the entire process. Even the same day of the accident, when interviewed by law enforcement, she told them she knew she was going to jail for what had happened.”

But Nikko’s family doesn’t believe she’s changed in the two years since the crash. They hope six years of prison time will force Hernandez to make the work a better place in Nikko’s honor.

“All we can hope now is she’s going to have some time to think about it, and we’re hoping that she can really do something with this time and realize what she’s done and learn from it as we are learning some things from it,” said Nikko’s dad Gus Malliarodakis.

Hernandez is at the Monterey County Jail until it’s determined which prison she will spend the next six years.

ORIGINAL POST: This morning U.C. Santa Cruz student Lynnea Hernandez was sentenced to six years in prison, after pleading guilty to her role in a deadly crash on Highway 1 in Moss Landing two years ago this week.

Hernandez pleaded guilty to two counts of reckless driving and two counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence.

Prosecutors say she was driving an SUV with friends on a Spring Break trip to Big Sur, when he crashed into another car.

The driver of the other car, Nikolas Malliarodakis and one of her passengers, Lillian Scott, were both killed.

KION’s Mariana Hicks will have more on this story tonight.