ST PAUL, Minn. (trfnews.i234.me) – A jury has found Derrick Thompson guilty of drug and firearm charges stemming from a high-speed crash that claimed the lives of five young women in Minneapolis. The trial lasted less than a week.
On Tuesday, jurors watched a violent and graphic video that showed Thompson’s rented SUV running a red light at high speed and crashing into a vehicle waiting at a stoplight. All five passengers inside the car that was struck were killed.
But both prosecutors and Thompson’s defense team told jurors it was not the most important piece of evidence they’d see in the case, urging them not to attempt to analyze the crash itself.
“This is a case about an armed drug dealer,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Thomas Calhoun-Lopez told the panel. “We are here today because (the) defendant crashed that car carrying 2,000 fentanyl pills, cocaine, fentanyl powder, and a loaded gun.”
Calhoun-Lopez explained Derrick Thompson’s subsequent fleeing and lying to police following the deadly crash proves the gun and drugs were his. In addition, DNA testing links Thompson to the items.
But the defense offered the jury an alternative theory that was absent from the public realm until recently when it was revealed that Thompson had a passenger in the rental car – his brother Damarco Thompson.
Thompson’s attorney Matthew Deates told jurors that Damarco is the flashier of the Thompson brothers and that he likes colorful, flashy things like the blue cap police found on the passenger side of the Escalade. Deates added that the colorful wrap on the handgun matches those tastes and that the spot where police found the bag containing the gun and drugs also points to the defendant’s brother.
“That is the definition of confirmation bias,” Deates said in his opening statement. “It’s tunnel vision. It does not make it right. This caused the government to charge the wrong person. But you – as the jury – gets to weigh the evidence and decide.”
Thompson’s legal woes are far from over – he faces five counts of third-degree murder and five counts of criminal vehicular homicide at the state level.