Driver impaired by drugs gets prison term in injury accident
Samuel E. Pressing, an East Aurora contractor, Friday was ordered to spend the next 2x to 7 years in state prison for causing two accidents while he was overmedicated on prescription drugs. In one of the accidents, the vocal cords of a Colden woman were severed.
“You’ve done enough, and you have really altered the life of an innocent victim,” State Supreme Court Justice John L. Michalski said as he imposed the maximum-allowable prison term and ordered Pressing to pay $1,590 in court costs and fines out of his prison wages.
The judge told Pressing, 40, of Olean Road, he hopes he gets the treatment he needs in prison for his overuse of prescription painkillers because he may kill someone the next time he is allowed to drive again.
Pressing has been jailed since the March 5 head-on crash on Main Street in the Town of Aurora that severed the vocal cord of BOCES teacher’s aide Beth Kruszka and caused injuries to her pelvis, liver and spleen.
On Friday Pressing, who was overusing seven prescription drugs for back pain, said he is sorry for “the pain and suffering” he caused her and “didn’t mean to hurt anyone.” He said he had been fighting his prescription drug addiction problems for some time.
Kruszka, who faces further vocal cord surgery and still walks with a cane, was in the courtroom.
Lynette M. Reda, chief of the Erie County District Attorney’s Vehicular Crimes Bureau, said Pressing was sentenced under a two-year-old state law making it a crime to drive impaired under the combined influence of even prescribed drugs.
The crash in which Kruszka was injured occurred while Pressing was free on bail and awaiting sentencing from Michalski on his guilty plea of last Nov. 21 to a felony driving under the influence of drugs charge for an incident last Sept. 8 on Olean Road in the Town of Aurora. Pressing smashed his car into a parked vehicle and drove off, and later was arrested because a passer-by witnessed the incident and turned his license plate number over to authorities, Reda said.
When he crashed head-on into Kruszka’s car in the 500 block of Main in Aurora last March, he claimed he was driving to a Gowanda medical facility to get an adjustment in his prescription pain-killing drugs — which he took because of a motorcycle accident years ago, Reda said.
The prosecutor said Kruszka has undergone 18 hours of surgery on her vocal cords and hopes that a scheduled surgery in October will restore her ability to speak and allow her to return to her job.
According to court records, in October 1998 Pressing was fined $500 and spared further punishment in Hamburg Village Court on his guilty plea to a misdemeanor DWI charge for a May 1998 drunken-driving incident.
