By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
CHEHALIS – The 26-year-old who reportedly drove his pickup truck into a Pe Ell house injuring a couple who were in their bed was charged yesterday with vehicular assault.
Brian T. Zock, of Pe Ell, was arrested Saturday morning after the collision and bailed out of jail before the weekend ended.
Zock appeared yesterday afternoon in Lewis County Superior Court with a large cut along his nose.
Judge Richard Brosey maintained bail at $10,000 and ordered Zock to refrain from consuming “any alcoholic beverages period, I don’t care in whatever setting.”
Troopers are blaming driving under the influence.
Aid and law enforcement were called about 1:30 a.m. on New Year’s Day to the home on North Third Street.
According to responders and charging documents, Zock’s Ford pickup broke through a wall and entered the bedroom.
Mary Moreau, 71, was knocked out of the bed and onto the floor of the bathroom, according to Assistant Fire Chief Mike Davis. Norman D. Moreau, 73, was still on the mattress but pushed up against the wall and appeared to have broken ribs, charging documents say.
He was flown to to Harborview Medical Center in Seattle with internal injures, according to the Washington State Patrol. She was initially taken to Providence Centralia Hospital with scrapes and less serious injuries, but was transferred.
The couple were both listed in satisfactory condition yesterday morning at Harborview.
Charging documents say Zock was slumped behind the steering wheel when law enforcement arrived. He was taken by troopers to the hospital where blood was drawn, as he refused to perform field sobriety tests, according to charging documents.
The truck was totaled.
Zock has a DUI from 2006 and a conviction for negligent driving in 2005. He has only one felony, according to Lewis County prosecutors.
Zock made a so-called Alford plea to seven counts of first-degree animal cruelty after a July 2006 incident in which he – with two other young men – allegedly got drunk and shot up several cows around Pe Ell and then partially butchered some of them.
Zock’s statement at sentencing in that case noted he had very little memory due to alcohol consumption causing a blackout.
His opportunity to make his plea on the vehicular assault charge will come on Jan. 13. The maximum penalty for the offense is 10 years in prison.
•••
Read “Vehicle crashes into Pe Ell bedroom overnight; two injured” from Saturday Jan. 1, 2010
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Notes from behind the news: What readers wanted to know in 2010
Sunday, January 2nd, 2011A vigil drew more than 200 mourners to Morton after the body of 16-year-old Austin King was found almost a month following his disappearance last summer
By Sharyn L. Decker
Lewis County Sirens news reporter
I realize 2010 has been over for a couple of days, but I’m going to take a look back briefly and tell you about the top stories of last year here on Lewis County Sirens.
Well since I started in June anyhow.
I can’t say for sure exactly what the most read news stories were, because if they are ranked somewhere in my web sites statistics, I haven’t found that part.
Austin King, found dead
But I can see the numbers for when people Google (or use other search engines) looking for something, and then come to Lewis County Sirens to read about it.
It’s sort of a toss up between the August fatal shootings that left 16-year-old David West Jr., his father and his father’s friend dead and the summer time saga of the missing 16-year-old Austin King of Morton who eventually was found dead.
More people were looking for news about “Austin King Morton” and “Jack Arnold Silverthorne” – the young man charged in his homicide – and related search terms than for stories about the Salkum-Onalaska area triple homicide. That is, if you leave out searches for Robbie Russell and variations on his name.
Three fatally shot, Salkum
I say it’s a toss up because who knows if people wanted to read about Russell a so-called person of interest in the slayings, or if they wanted to read about his (many) other reasons for being in the news; such as confessing he brought methamphetamine into the jail hidden in his “keister”, trying to outrun deputies in his red Corvette through the Chehalis Industrial Park, getting pulled over with a tennis ball sized clump of methamphetamine in his car or … you see what I mean.
The third most widely read story seems to be October crash of the Cessna from the Chehalis-based Pacific Cataract and Laser Institute that killed pilot Ken Sabin and his passengers Rod Rinta and Dr. Paul Shenk.
Chehalis Cessna crashes
After that, news on July 2 that 21-year-old Ivy M. Dolowy was killed when her car crashed into a tree on state Route 6 was near the top of the list.
The name of the young woman from Chehalis shows up as the most searched for name of all.
More specifically, key phrases searched for are ranked. The most searched for terms are “Lewis County Sirens” and its variations, and next comes “Ivy Dolowy”.
However, there are so many ways to look for John Allen Booth Jr. – the former Onalaska man charged with aggravated first-degree murder in the triple homicide – that when I add those all up, a handful of people were more interested in him than her.
Ronda Reynolds case
The next most popular story is Ronda Reynolds, the Toledo woman whose death more than a decade ago resulted in an unprecedented judicial review of a coroner’s decision last year. And then of course, author Ann Rule published her book in October renewing the public’s interest in the case.
Finally, an awful lot of people wanted to read about Donato Valle Vega, the man indicted in September after federal agents found nearly 10 pounds of cocaine in the attic of his Centralia Auto Sales business.
So those are the top six or seven stories readers were looking for when they came to Lewis County Sirens.
However, all that doesn’t really tell me what people have read the most or enjoyed reading the best, because the majority of visitors have bookmarked Lewis County Sirens and presumably just look over whatever news appears on the homepage.
I’d be very interested in hearing what readers liked, didn’t like or would hope to see written about in 2011. Feel free to send me a note or comment.
And hopefully by the end of this coming December, I will have found a statistics program that simply ranks each story by number of readers.
Tags:By Sharyn L. Decker, news reporter
Posted in Columns and commentary | 2 Comments »