“Honorable judge, on the evening of Aug. 23, 2006 I got the phone call that every parent dreads. It was the phone call that knocked me down and brought me to my knees,” said Mary Logan, Candace Tift’s mother, before the sentencing.
“It was from Wade [Tift’s husband] telling me that Candace was in a coma, brain dead and on life support, and I only had hours to say goodbye,” she said.
Logan, who lives in Arizona, was able to make it to her daughter before she died, though one of Tift’s younger sisters was not. Facts like that, the family argued, are why Judge Daniel McNerney should have sentenced Johns to the maximum 10-year sentence. Instead, he gave her six years, and with time off for good behavior she could be released in three.
In a packed courtroom on the 10th floor of Santa Ana’s Central Justice Center, more than a hundred people gathered to hear Johns’ sentencing. Johns’ family was seated to the right with Tift’s family next to them in the center. While only a few feet separated the two, it could have been an ocean as the day began. Johns sat in the front, in a navy blue Orange County Jail jumpsuit, with her head down, crying almost the whole time.
Candace Tift’s friends and family have often said it’s hard to sympathize with Johns, whom they say has shown no remorse or accepted responsibility for Tift’s death.
Johns was convicted of being under the prescription of cough medicine, Xanax and the sleeping aid Ambien when she fatally hit Tift on West Coast Highway in 2006. Defense attorneys argued she was not asleep but in an unconscious state triggered by acute grief from her husband’s death a month earlier.
