An Oxford woman accused of aggravated vehicular homicide was on trial Wednesday for allegedly ignoring the flashing red lights on a school bus and striking a one-year-old boy.

Randalla Wright sobbed silently through most of the witnesses in Judge Noah Powers’ courtroom. Eye witnesses testified Wright was parked on Michelle Drive in Oxford waiting for her daughter’s school bus on Sept. 2, 2011. Three small children were waiting in the grassy area on the corner at Merry Day Road and when she allegedly ignored the flashing red lights and safety bar on the bus and went to turn right, she struck and killed Bentley Blake.

Oxford police officer Robert Lindner said when Bentley’s mother Mary Long approached him with her son cradled in her arms, he knew the child was either dead or dying.

“A lady was running towards me, yelling hysterically and carrying a small child...,” he testified. “I looked at the child, and my experience as a paramedic told me the child was either deceased or critically injured.”

Assistant Prosecutor John Heinkel asked the doctor if the wounds on the child would be consistent with the boy being hit first by the front tires and then the rear tires. The doctor agreed.

However, defense attorney Neal Schuett, when questioning the lead detective on the case Oxford Police Sgt. Geoff Robinson, got him to admit the track marks don’t match the front tires.

Heinkel rested his case late in the afternoon and Schuett asked Powers to acquit his client for lack of evidence. He said there were few people who saw the actual impact, there was no evidence she hit the child with the front of her car or where the impact happened and no one knows how the child got into the street. He said no one said she drove up on the curb and no one heard screaming tires, like she was driving recklessly.

“At this point there’s a lot of conjecture, but there is not enough to show recklessness in our view,” he said.

Heinkel said Wright’s conflicting stories about the events of that day should be sufficient to let the case continue to its conclusion.

“She gave two or three different stories about what happened that day,” he said. “Ranging from somebody else shoved the kid in front of her, to the fact that she had to look in her rear view mirror to see the kids before she left the scene. They are obviously contradictory statements, both of which cannot be true in this case.”

Powers ruled the trial will resume Tuesday. The aggravated enhancement was because Wright was driving on a suspended license and violated school bus safety laws. If found guilty, she faces a possible eight-year prison term.

Contact this reporter at (513) 696-4525 or dcallahan@coxohio.com.