A teen who crashed his car while racing through a residential neighborhood injuring himself and his three teen passengers has been sentenced to 150 days in jail.
The driver, Ryan Flores Armstrong, 18, entered guilty pleas before Circuit Court Judge Bart Stanley to charges of vehicular assault and reckless endangerment. He was ordered to serve 150 days of a three-year sentence, pay $500 plus costs, perform 24 hours public service work, make restitution and lose his driver license.
Armstrong was a juvenile when he crashed his car through the front yard of a home on West End Avenue over the summer. However, since he was just three days shy of his 18th birthday, prosecutors transferred him to adult court given the severity of his crime.
His jail time comes after the 1999 Plymouth Breeze he was driving left the road on West End Avenue late in the evening of July 26 and slammed into a tree. The crash left Armstrong along with his three teen passengers seriously injured, two of them airlifted for treatment of life-threatening injuries.
An investigation revealed Armstrong was traveling 80 mph when he lost control on the two-lane residential city street and ran through a front yard narrowly missing the house. The posted speed limit on the house-lined street is 30 mph. Witnesses say the Plymouth was taking up both lanes when it came upon another car heading toward it, causing Armstrong to swerve and prompting his loss of control at a high rate of speed.
Police believe Armstrong was high when his car slammed into the tree. Specifically, they found an aerosol can on the driver’s side of the vehicle and a witness who was in the car at the time of the wreck told police Armstrong was huffing the contents of the can for purposes of intoxication.