A Texas man charged with manslaughter after hitting the mother of his 1-year-old child with his car will retain his parental rights, a judge has ruled.
Ulise DeLao, 29, was arrested on May 28 and charged with intoxication manslaughter in Canyon, Texas, after police were dispatched to a vehicle crash involving a pedestrian. DeLao had struck Brittany Torres, 27, as she was standing outside of the vehicle and she was pronounced dead at the scene, Canyon Police said at the time.
An online fundraiser for Torres’ family said she and DeLao were in a relationship.
Randall County court records show he is charged with manslaughter. In August a grand jury declined to indict DeLao for an upgraded charge of murder. He entered a plea of not guilty shortly after his arrest, his attorney Jesse Quackenbush said.
On Monday, a Randall County Judge ruled in a separate case that he can keep his parental rights over his 1-year-old child with Torres.
The day after Torres’ death, her mother, Jaqueline Sanchez, filed a petition in Randall County civil court seeking to become the legal guardian of DeLao and Torres’ 1-year-old son, Law&Crime and local ABC station KVII-TV reported. NBC News has reviewed the docket summary for that case.
However, on Monday, Judge James W. Anderson rejected the bid to terminate DeLao’s parental rights, the outlets reported.
“The judge refused to terminate his parental rights,” Quackenbush told NBC News. “There’s no intention on the part of the court system to take away his parental rights at all now or in the future. The judge made a final non-appealable decision based on his discretion that there was no evidence to terminate parental rights.”
Quackenbush said the judge made “the absolute right decision.”
He said that there was no intentional crime in the May death. “After our grand jury looked at it with a fine tooth comb in Randall County, Texas, they’ve determined there’s zero evidence of intentional conduct, that this, at best, is a manslaughter, accidental death case,” he said on the grand jury’s refusal to indict DeLao on a murder charge in the case.
Sanchez’s attorney did not immediately respond to NBC News’ request for comment Thursday.
Quackenbush said his client admitted to running over his girlfriend, but that it was by accident.
“She had gotten out of the car extremely intoxicated at her home, where my client drove her, and he was pulling away in a very normal way, and she was in back of the car, and he didn’t know it, and she was run over and killed accidentally,” he said.
DeLao had been released in October on $250,000 bond, records show. Under his bond conditions he cannot use alcohol, drugs, cannot leave Potter, Randall or Armstrong counties, must surrenders passports, have a device installed on his vehicle that uses “a deep lung breath analysis mechanism” and must wear a GPS tracking device.
Quackenbush said DeLao, who he described as an honorably discharged veteran who served six years in the Marine Corps with no prior criminal record, intends to fight the manslaughter charge.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
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