Jury convicts driver in crash that killed two from Eugene Symphony
A Linn County jury found Fivea Sharipoff guilty on all counts Tuesday. By Associated PressALBANY, Ore. (AP) - A Linn County jury convicted a woman of assault, two counts of manslaughter and drunken driving Tuesday for causing a freeway accident that killed two musicians from the Eugene Symphony last year. Fivea Sharipoff was driving the wrong way on Interstate-5 at Albany when she collided with a car, killing Kjersten Oquist of Wood Village and Angela Svendsen of Vancouver, Wash., who were headed home after rehearsal. The trial began more than a week ago and Sharipoff, 27, of Salem, is to be sentenced June 24. Prosecutor Douglas Marteeny said that Sharipoff's blood alcohol level was at .24, three times the legal limit, less than an hour after the crash. Sharipoff said she was born to Russian parents in Portland, moving at age 6 to Argentina and to Brazil when she got married at age 14. In 2000 Sharipoff returned to the United States and placed her oldest child, a 12-year-old boy, in foster care because of disabilities. The day of the accident, she dropped him off at his Lebanon foster home and met a friend at a pizza parlor. According to testimony, between the two of them they had as many as four pitchers of beer. Sharipoff testified she felt no effects of alcohol when she left Albany after 10 p.m. and began to cry as she described what happened next: "I was driving on that road," she said. "I'm just following the signs." She said she never saw a do-not-enter sign as she drove onto the off-ramp of Interstate 5, heading south into northbound traffic. "I panicked. It happened so fast," she said. She said she doesn't remember the collision but remembers being helped out of her car and hardly being able to stand because of the pain, and then waking up in the Albany hospital. "To this day, I can't live with myself knowing that I caused all this suffering for the families," she said. Some years ago, Sharipoff had gone through a program following an arrest for drunken driving and said she had learned from it. (Copyright 2008 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
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