Licking County Judge David Branstool said Thursday he expects to issue a verdict in the criminal trial for Jacob McDonald early next week.
The third day of McDonald's trial in Licking County included the defense calling two witnesses to discredit the charges against McDonald, the prosecution and defense resting their case and closing arguments. McDonald is charged with 26 counts, including six counts of aggravated vehicular homicide for allegedly causing a deadly Nov. 2023 bus crash on I-70.
The crash killed six people, including three high school students, traveling from Tuscarawas County to the Greater Columbus Convention Center. The victims were John Mosley, 18, Jeffery Worrell, 18, Katelyn Owens, 15, Dave Kennat, 56, Kristy Gaynor, 39, and Shannon Wigfield, 46.
After closing arguments wrapped up around 3:25 p.m., Branstool announced he would speak Friday on his schedule for considering the case and likely issue a verdict next week.
During the trial, defense attorney Chris Brigdon called on his only two witnesses in the case. Those were a crash reconstruction expert and a digital analyst. Licking County Chief Felony Prosecutor Cliff Murphy tried to discredit the witnesses.
Sebastian Van Nooten, who analyzes crash scenes, testified he doesn't think McDonald was driving recklessly.
"There's nothing that I see in the data that I am looking at that suggests he is driving recklessly," Van Nooten said.
That argument is the main reason McDonald is pleading not guilty to causing the chain reaction crash.
Prosecutor Cliff Murphy then worked to poke holes in VanNooten's report on the crash. That included having Van Nooten admit early on that he made a mistake on the first page of his report on the crash.
Van Nooten was hired by McDonald's company and lawyer to assess the crash. He arrived two days after to analyze the scene and compiled other evidence to create his report.
Branstool had to admonish Murphy, the prosecutor, twice as he questioned Van Nooten about his findings.
The second witness was Anthony Gentile, a digital forensic analyst with Envista Forensics. Gentile's testimony focused on the evidence used by the prosecution to argue McDonald was distracted by his phone leading up to the crash.
That evidence was a data report from AT&T that showed a data spike. About 10 minutes before the crash, McDonald's phone data usage hit 39.8 megabytes per minute. According to a phone company the report cited, streaming videos in HD uses 41.7 megabytes of data per minute.
Brigdon asked Gentile to read a disclaimer about this data to the court written by AT&T. That disclaimer states that the company's network constantly communicated with devices, but the information provided does not mean the customer — in this case McDonald — initiated the data usage.
Gentile said the data usage could have come from an incoming message that McDonald didn't necessarily look at while driving.
"It's pretty straightforward to me that AT&T is saying that... we do not know as a network whether these are user-initiated transactions or network-initiated transactions," Gentile said. "They do not retain records that allow them to differentiate."
Murphy questioned Gentile further on what caused McDonald's phone data to spike before the crash. Murphy insisted that it is clear that data was being used on the phone.
Gentile responded repeatedly that there isn't a way to tell where the request for data was coming from.
"It didn't come from Mars," Murphy said. "It's something that is actively on the report. That's a standard disclaimer, like smoking can cause cancer."
Murphy also pointed out Gentile never worked for AT&T or a consultant for the company.
When questioned, Gentile said he never saw the report cited by the National Transportation Safety Board that said McDonald's device spiked to 39.8 megabytes per minute.
Branstool ended the third day of the trial telling the audience he will issue plenty of advanced notice to the parties before he issues a verdict.
"I anticipate at this point Monday on Tuesday of next week," Branstool said.
