OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. – A man was arrested more than a year after his teenage son ran a stop sign and struck an SUV at an intersection in Poinciana, a crash that the Florida Highway Patrol says killed four of the SUV’s occupants, according to News4JAX’s sister station WKMG.
Richard Ferguson, 68, faces four counts of vehicular manslaughter in connection to the 2023 crash, records show.
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His son, who was 15 years old at the time, did not have a learner’s permit and had three other 15-year-old boys in the car with him when he ran a stop sign at a high rate of speed and slammed into the left side of the SUV, according to the FHP.
The crash happened around 7 p.m. on Sept. 3, 2023, at the intersection of San Miguel Street and Laurel Avenue, which was a two-way stop until more signage was added in the days after the deadly wreck.
The crash resulted in the deaths of a 50-year-old woman and three children — a 1-year-old girl, 9-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl — as well as the hospitalization of a man with serious injuries, all of whom were in the SUV, officials said.
According to the affidavit for Ferguson’s arrest warrant, he had allowed his son to drive the car. The document cites investigators’ interviews with the teens in recounting how Ferguson told them to buckle up and come right back after he moved another vehicle so the boy could exit the driveway.
Sabrina Hernandez, the mother of the three children killed in the crash and the daughter of the woman, said at a vigil shortly after the crash that while she forgave the teen, she still wanted him to be held accountable, as well as for something to be done about traffic offenders and a lack of traffic enforcement in the area.
“Are we not worth it in Poinciana? Do we count at all? What is the difference that you can go into another town and there’s cops everywhere?” she said. “(...) I’m not going to stop until I get justice for my family. Because the same way he went ahead and ate the stop sign and killed my family, he still got to wake up today and my family didn’t.”
At Ferguson’s first appearance in court on Thursday, the judge set his bond at $60,000, or $15,000 for each charge.
The state attorney’s office has moved forward with charges for the driver and there is an active warrant for his arrest, an FHP spokesperson said in a statement. It’s not known at the time of this report, however, if the boy will be charged as an adult.