Idaho trial begins for girl’s hypothermia death
SHOSHONE, Idaho — A father accused of allowing his 11-year-old daughter to walk to her death along a cold, rural highway on Christmas Day failed to do what he needed to protect her, a prosecutor said Tuesday.
Robert Aragon put his children at risk “and one of them died,” Lincoln County Attorney E. Scott Paul said during opening statements.
Aragon, 56, is charged with involuntary manslaughter in the death of his daughter, Sage, who died of hypothermia after trekking several miles in freezing conditions after her father’s vehicle got stuck in a snowdrift on Dec. 25.
He also is charged with felony injury to a child for allowing his son, Bear, 13, join his sister on the 10-mile hike to their mother’s house. Bear was found more than 4 miles from where the children started walking, suffering from hypothermia in a single-stall restroom at a federal Bureau of Land Management recreational site.
Public defender Patrick McMillen said Aragon had the children’s safety in mind and implored his children to be careful, according to the Times News.
“This man is not a felon,” McMillen said.
If convicted, Aragon faces up to a decade in prison for involuntary manslaughter and up to another 10 years for felony injury to a child.
Aragon, who lived with the children in Jerome, was driving them to their mother when his car got stuck in a snowdrift along an isolated rural roadway in Lincoln County on Christmas Day. The children asked Aragon if they could walk the rest of the way to see their mom, and Aragon agreed, the prosecutor told the jury.
“He told them to stay together,” Paul said. “There are no longer any hypotheticals, what-if’s or what might have been.”
Police say that sometime after the children began walking, Aragon freed his car from the snow and drove back to Jerome. The children’s mother called to say they never arrived, and authorities later found Aragon searching for the children at the site where the car had become stranded.
A search and rescue team found the boy at a rest area near the highway. He told police his sister had turned back when she could no longer walk.
Sage’s body was found by a search dog less than three miles from where she started the trek, barely visible under a pile of snow and wearing a heavy coat and pajama bottoms.
Temperatures in the area at the time the girl was missing ranged from 27 degrees to minus 5. Winds were blowing up to 25 mph with snow and ice.
Information from: The Times-News, www.magicvalley.com
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