A woman charged with killing four people and injuring dozens more by driving her car into spectators at Oklahoma State University's 2015 homecoming parade was sentenced Tuesday to life in prison after accepting a plea deal.
Adacia Chambers, 26, was sentenced in Payne County District Court after pleading no contest to four counts of second-degree murder and 39 counts of assault and battery.
Chambers was due to stand trial Tuesday and prosecutors had estimated it could have lasted a month due to the extensive list of potential witnesses, including victims, first-responders and detectives.
Chambers was apologetic to victims of the crash.
"If only I could change the past. My prayers are always with the victims," Chambers said in court. "I was suffering from psychosis that day."
Chambers' attorney, Tony Coleman, said his client took the plea agreement because she didn't want to put the victims' families through such a long trial.
"From the very moment that it was being entertained, a plea offer, Miss Chambers showed immediate interest, and it wasn't long thereafter she even took it a step further and made it abundantly clear to us that she did not want to go to trial," Coleman said.
Coleman said a plea deal wasn't offered to Chambers until after Christmas.
Taken with an additional 10-year sentence added to her life term for the assault and battery charges, Chambers figures to still be in prison when she's a senior citizen.
Prosecutors alleged Chambers purposely steered her car around a police barricade and sped up before she plowed into the crowd watching the parade before Oklahoma State's game against the University of Kansas.
Killed in the crash were Nikita Nakal, a 23-year-old MBA student from India at the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, a married couple, Bonnie Jean Stone and Marvin Lyle Stone, both 65, and 2-year-old Nash Lucas. Dozens more were injured, many of them children.
Dozens of family members and crash survivors read victim impact statements in court after Chambers entered her plea.
"At one point in time, she leaned over to me, and her exact words were, 'This is why I didn't want to go to trial. I don't want to put the family and the victims through this,'" Coleman said.
Chambers' attorneys had argued in pretrial hearings that she had a mental illness and was experiencing a psychiatric episode at the time of the crash.
Her father said she received psychiatric treatment at an in-patient facility several years ago. A judge, though, ruled that Chambers was competent to stand trial and refused a defense request to move the trial to another jurisdiction.
Coleman was critical of the state's mental health system in a news conference after sentencing, saying Chambers' father tried unsuccessfully for years to get her the right mental health care.
"Now, all of a sudden, she's got this wonderful blend of meds that has her stable. It's a sad state of affairs that we had to go here before she got the help that she needed," Coleman said.
Coleman has said when he told Chambers about the deaths after the crash, "her face was blank" and that he wasn't sure if she even realized she was in jail.
