Man convicted in fatal North Versailles Thanksgiving crash gets up to 140 years in prison

Kaylie Meininger wasn’t really Taylor Price’s big sister, but that’s what she called her friend anyway.

She called Meininger’s fiancé, David Bianco, her brother-in-law and referred to the couple’s 2-year-old daughter, Annika, as her niece.

Price said she last spoke to the young family via video chat the morning of Thanksgiving 2016, and she expected to call again that night after doing her Christmas shopping.

On Wednesday, Price recalled the phone call she got while out shopping telling her the entire family was dead.

“I dropped to the ground,” she told the full courtroom Tuesday morning. “All the people who were around me suddenly vanished, and I was the only person there and my universe was shattered.”

Family and friends described for Common Pleas Judge David Cashman the hole left by the loss of the young couple and their daughter, killed as they drove to Thanksgiving dinner on Route 30 when a fleeing suspect barreled into their Ford Taurus. Cashman then sentenced Demetrius Coleman to up to 140 years in prison, essentially a life term.

Coleman, then 22, was fleeing from a traffic stop that Thanksgiving Day. Police had pulled him over for an illegal left turn near the GetGo on Route 30 in North Versailles. Coleman didn’t have a license. His passenger was carrying heroin. He was wanted on two bench warrants.

Coleman throttled down the highway at speeds that topped 100 mph before he slammed into Meininger’s car, creating a fiery explosion that tossed the car into the air and killed the family instantly.

“I would like to apologize to the family,” Coleman said Wednesday, speaking to Cashman but addressing the family of his victims sitting behind him.

Coleman told Cashman he hadn’t had the opportunity to apologize. He called the day of the crash a tragedy.

“I understand it doesn’t mean much, but I never intended to hurt their relatives. I am sorry.”

No one spoke on Coleman’s behalf other than his attorney, T. Brent McCune, who said his client had a troubled family life. He quoted Coleman’s aunt as saying her nephew was “a crack baby born in state prison.”

“He did not intend to kill anyone,” McCune said. “He is remorseful.”

Prosecutors asked Cashman to hand to a down a mandatory life sentence, pointing to a state law that applies to defendants with multiple third-degree murder convictions. McCune argued the statute did does not apply to Coleman, as his convictions came all at once.

Cashman did not outright sentence Coleman to life in prison, but he will still spend the rest of his life there. Stacked consecutively, the sentence totals 70 to 140 years for 25-year-old Coleman. He said Coleman thought he could take to the highway and do what he wanted, and he thought he could outrun the police.

“But you didn’t,” Cashman told him. “The only thing you did was devastate one family after another.”

Joanna Moore, Bianco’s cousin, said she tries not to spend time at home anymore, particularly on holidays. She’d been living with the family at the time of the crash and now, she said, it’s too painfully quiet.

“I won’t hear Annie ask me a million times what I’m doing or where I’m going,” she said. “I won’t get to see her put on the school bus that she loved watching go by. I won’t get to blow bubbles with her or color with chalk or watch ‘Minions’ a million times. I won’t hear Kaylie ask me and David simple questions like, ‘How do I heat up stuffed shells in the microwave?’”

Family and friends laughed through tears at the remark.

Kathy Bianco said she thinks of her son, David, and his young family every day.

“I will never have closure. As long as I breathe, the pain will be there every day I wake up,” she wrote in a letter. “Until we meet again, I will have to wake up every day and deal with the pain that you caused for myself and my family. May God forgive you, because right now in my heart, I can’t do so.”