PRESTON, Minn. — The father of two children who were killed when Samantha Jo Petersen slammed the SUV she was driving into the Amish buggy they were in says he thought he did enough to keep his children safe.
He personally trained one of the gentlest ponies he could find and installed a slow-moving vehicle sign and reflective pole on the vehicle.
“I had not considered other people and their decision-making,” he said in a written statement to Fillmore County District Court as Judge Jeremy Clinefelter weighed the punishment for Petersen, who plotted with her identical twin sister to take responsibility for the crash two years ago in southeastern Minnesota.
Clinefelter sentenced Petersen to four years in prison for her conviction of criminal vehicular homicide. The term will be served concurrently with a 23-month sentence for another count of criminal vehicular operation.
Petersen, 37, of Wabasha, pleaded guilty to the two counts in July. In the plea, she admitted to being high on methamphetamine when she struck a two-wheeled horse-drawn buggy at 8:25 a.m. on Sept. 25, 2023, on Fillmore County Road 1 near the intersection with County Road 102.
Two children and a pony pulling the buggy were killed in the crash. Two more children were injured.
Petersen initially faced 21 charges in the incident, including charges relating to having her sister take responsibility for the crash.
Before Clinefelter pronounced the sentence, written statements by the four children’s parents were read to the court.
The mother of the children described a routine morning of seeing her kids off to school, preparing for a horse sale and a visitor who was coming to purchase some eggs produced by their chickens at their rural Fillmore County home. Someone pulled into their driveway in a red truck.
“I saw right away something terrible had happened,” the woman wrote.
She recalled arriving at the scene of the crash and seeing one of her daughters sitting up, injured but dazed, her son lying on the gravel shoulder groaning and coming to, and her two other daughters lying in a ditch next to the road.
One of them was already gone, she recalled.
“I saw that life had fled,” she wrote.
Passers-by were performing CPR on another whose face “looked deathly gray,” she recalled.
From the scene, Petersen was using her phone to ask her identical twin sister, Sarah Beth Petersen, to come take responsibility for the crash.
Clinefelter said that was one of the reasons he imposed a prison sentence instead of probation, as Petersen’s attorney, Carson Heefner, asked.
“It was all about you,” Clinefelter said of Petersen’s actions and deception. “At the time children were literally dying in a ditch.”
Both parents wrote that their pain and loss are “indescribable.” Their youngest was always moving and talking. Seeing her “still form” in a coffin was unnatural, the mother wrote.
“Had she been alive, she wouldn’t have been able to be still that long,” the father wrote.
The surviving children are changed, with one boy enduring a prolonged hospital stay to recover from a traumatic brain injury.
Petersen cried as she read from a written statement apologizing for causing the “unthinkable void” in the family’s life. She noted her work getting and staying sober since being charged in the crash.
“My addiction took a lot from me, but it took your whole world from you,” Petersen said.
Clinefelter said the prison sentence doesn’t preclude Petersen from continuing to work on her sobriety.
Petersen was ordered to serve two years, eight months of the sentence in custody and could qualify for early release and serve the final year and four months of the sentence on supervised release with good behavior.
Sarah Petersen, of Kellogg, was sentenced in March to 90 days in jail under work release for lying to investigators.
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