After a bout of excessive drinking, Amanda Kosal got behind the wheel of her car and started speeding down the highway. The woman from Redford Township, Michigan, was extremely intoxicated when her car drifted into oncoming traffic and smashed head-first into an SUV. Kosal killed 31-year-old Jerome Zirker in the accident while critically injuring his girlfriend, Brittany Johnson, also 31, which left their family broken and thrust into unexpected grief.
Typically, Zirker and Johnson would have been in the car with their five children. However, this day Zirker had picked up Johnson after a twelve-hour shift at work, and the children were with their beloved grandmother. Thankfully, they were not in the vehicle when Kosal smashed her car into theirs, or the children might have been killed or critically injured, too.
“Luckily, they were at grandma’s house, or it would have been all of us,” Johnson later told WDIV Local 4.
Kosal was arrested and pleaded guilty to operating a vehicle while under the influence of alcohol, causing death. With her verdict determined, it was time for her to await sentencing from Judge Qiana Lillard. But before the judge would slam the gavel on Kosal’s future, she wanted the family of the victim to get a chance to read their victim impact statements to ensure that Kosal realizes the extent of harm she caused this innocent family.
However, Kosal’s family thinks it is all a joke. One man related to the defendant was smiling in court during the pivotal moment. The man was insulting the victims’ of the tragedy.
“It’s time for him to go,” Judge Lillard said when she noticed the laughing clown. The man was escorted out of the courtroom.
“I don’t know who he is, but whoever can sit here at a tragic moment like this and laugh and smile when somebody has lost a family member… I mean, in the entire time Mr. Zirker’s sister was speaking, that clown— and that’s what I’m going to call him, a clown— was sitting there smiling and laughing.”
Although the judge was clear, Kosal’s family didn’t care. Amanda Kosal’s mother, Donna Kosal, began making faces and making light of the tragedy shortly after the man was taken out of the courtroom.
“You can go too,” the judge tells Donna Kosal. “Because if you don’t know how to act, you can go to jail.”
However, Donna threw a fit instead of quietly walking out of court. This forced Judge Lillard to punish Donna for “further disrupting proceedings.”
She sentenced Donna to 93 days in jail for contempt of court. She was not messing around.
“Anyone else want to go? Try it,” the judge tells the room.
“I understand that you are all very upset because your loved one is going to prison,” she says, addressing Kosal’s family. “But guess what? She’s going to prison for the choice that she made.”
“These people are here grieving, saddened because a senseless act took away their loved one, and you’re sitting here acting like it’s a joke?”
Kosal was sentenced to three to fifteen years for killing a person while driving drunk.
