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Yeager Pleads Guilty to DUI in 2012 Head-on Car Wreck

A two-year-old court case was finally resolved last week when Brandi Yeager, 33, pleaded guilty to a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol.

Yeager is a former employee of the SAFE women’s shelter in Dillingham. In January 2012, she was driving a SAFE vehicle and had a blood alcohol 2.5x over the legal limit when she swerved lanes and caused a head-on collision in front of the boat harbor. The accident sent several people to the hospital. KDLG’s Dave Bendinger has more:

Audio Transcript:

Brandi Yeager will spend a total of three days in jail for causing the horrific car wreck that fractured her own knee, and caused a broken arm and leg of a passenger in the other car. According to the police investigation, the hospital measured Yeager's BAC at .202%. She also tested positive for marijuana and oxycodone, a pill commonly used as a substitute for heroin.

The wreck happened late on a bitterly cold January 27, 2012. The first responders worked furiously to free the occupants from both vehicles before anybody got frostbite. The temperatures were so cold that extrication equipment made of plastic stopped working, and rescue crews had to pull passengers out of the vehicles manually.

Yeager hired a good attorney, Myron Angstman from Bethel, who strung the case out for two years. The defense was prepared to argue that the head-on accident wasn’t Yeager’s fault, as it had occurred in her lane on Kanakanak Road in front of the boat harbor. But the police said Yeager had swerved first into oncoming traffic. The other driver, in the opposite lane, saw Yeager and crossed lanes to try and avoid an accident. When Yeager swerved back into her own lane, the two cars collided head-on.

To get the guilty plea for DUI, state prosecutors dropped six counts of felony assault they had originally filed against Yeager. They also dismissed a misdemeanor charge of driving under the influence of controlled substances, those being the marijuana and oxycodone.

Yeager posted bail not long after her original arrest, but violated the conditions of her release three times before the case was settled. (On one occasion she was caught with oxycodone without a prescription.) As part of the deal, two of the VCR charges were dropped, and she pleaded guilty to a third. For that, she received a full 30 days of jail time.  

Judge Vanessa White presided over Friday's hearing. She allowed Yeager to postpone serving her 33 day sentence until sometime after April.

Yeager will spend three years on supervised probation following her release.

The SAFE women's shelter was named in one of several civil lawsuits filed after the accident. According to SAFE Executive Director Ginger Baim, the case was settled after SAFE's insurance company agreed to cover the medical costs of the injured parties.

Baim said that Yeager had not been authorized to use the SAFE vehicle for personal use, and she was fired not long after the accident.