Galen Young’s family upset after the woman who caused his death gets no prison time
The woman who caused the death of former Charlotte 49ers basketball star Galen Young by accidentally driving her car into his mother’s house accepted a plea deal Tuesday in Tennessee that included no prison time.
And Young’s family is upset about it.
On June 5, 2021, 19-year-old Miracle Rutherford was speeding at 2:45 a.m. in Memphis when she lost control of her car, went airborne and plowed into a house. Young, who was visiting his mother and inside her house watching a movie on a desktop computer, was killed instantly due to blunt force trauma, an autopsy later determined.
As part of the plea deal, Rutherford pleaded guilty to reckless vehicular homicide and was put into a judicial diversion program in lieu of prison Tuesday by Shelby County Criminal Court Judge Melissa Boyd. If Rutherford completes the program’s conditions, including 200 hours of community service and full-time employment, she won’t ever go to prison.
In phone interviews with The Observer this week, three of the people closest to Young described their disappointment in the punishment.
“The part that hurts more than anything is she gets a slap on the wrist and can walk away like it didn’t happen,” said Elliott Young, Galen’s brother.
“It’s really hard to fathom that she won’t spend a day in jail,” said Scarlett Harrod, Young’s girlfriend for the eight years preceding his death.
“She killed someone whose life mattered to a lot of people,” said Tammy Young, Galen’s sister. “Galen mattered. He existed. How can that get wiped away so easily? I can’t even go out and get a student loan and default on it and not have it affect me in some way. How is it that you get to go out and kill someone, take someone’s life, in the sanctuary and comfort of their own home?”
Elliott Young said that the Tennessee judicial system also didn’t have a chance to work as efficiently as it should have because of what he called “incompetent” police work by the Memphis police on the night of the accident.
The original police report shows that Rutherford wasn’t tested for alcohol or drug usage after the incident. If she had been and had been found to be under the influence of alcohol or drugs, receiving judicial diversion and no prison time would have been less likely, according to what Young’s family said they were told by members of the district attorney’s office.
“We have a police force that was incompetent from the very beginning and that had a huge influence on the outcome,” Young said, referring to the Memphis police department. “There’s no way you can convince me that a car running into a house doesn’t justify some type of testing. Drug testing, alcohol testing, something — because that’s not normal by any stretch of the imagination.”
Shelby County district attorney Steve Mulroy and assistant district attorney J.D. Hamblen, who represented the state of Tennessee in the case, didn’t immediately return email and phone messages Wednesday.
Galen Young helped catapult two UNC Charlotte teams into the NCAA tournament in the late 1990s. He was the MVP of the Conference USA tournament in 1999, became an NBA second-round draft pick and played professionally for 13 years, mostly overseas.
When he died, Young was 45 years old. He had already begun to pack for a new high school basketball coaching job he was excited about and was supposed to start the next day in Jackson, Mississippi. His death wasn’t discovered until about five hours after the crash.
The night Galen Young died
On the last night of his life, Young had come home late after visiting with a friend. His mother, Gladys Young, had already gone to bed and believed her son was spending the night with that friend from Young’s college basketball days.
Then, at 2:45 a.m., Rutherford’s 2008 silver Mitsubishi Galant hit a large pothole, went airborne at around 60 mph and crashed into the house. The home was on family land in Memphis that was more than 100 years old and had been bought by ancestors, according to Young family lore, for 500 bales of cotton. The portion of the house that the car hit collapsed on impact, and Young’s body was buried under a mountain of rubble.
The car was eventually towed that night and Rutherford — unhurt in the accident — wasn’t taken to the police station and was allowed to leave the scene.
The Young family, believing Galen to be elsewhere, kept trying to call Galen to tell him about the crash and ask him to come over immediately. When the sun came out and they started clearing away debris from the cash in the early morning, Gladys Young, Galen’s mother, began to hear the faint ring of a phone in the rubble each time they tried to call Galen.
Still, the family believed Galen Young had accidentally left his phone at his mother’s house — he was prone to doing that, they say — and that it was just the phone that they were about to unearth.
“So we keep pulling stuff out,” Tammy Young said. “And we get to my mom’s computer chair. And I’m like, ‘Oh my, look at your chair. It’s all mangled.’ And then my son lifted the chair away, and that’s when I saw him. It took my breath. And my mom screamed, ‘Galen, Galen, wake up!’ And of course, he didn’t ever wake up.”
The impact statements
Galen Young’s brother, sister, mother and longtime girlfriend all read victim impact statements in a Tennessee courtroom Monday.
“On June 5, 2021, it felt like the lights went out and the mute button was pressed on life,” Harrod, Young’s girlfriend for eight years and now a resident of Durham, read aloud in her victim impact statement that she later provided to The Observer. “The incredible trauma of losing the love of my life in an instant, along with all the layers of our life and plans, is an indescribable level of loss. Since that day, I live with my grief every moment. My grief and my trauma are heavy, quiet, unbearable at times, invisible to most, and are now a permanent part of my being.”
In court Tuesday, Judge Boyd took a large photo of Galen Young and held it in front of Rutherford, telling her, according to Young’s family: “This is the life you took.”
The judge also told Rutherford that she needed to address the Young family directly in court.
Through tears and flanked by several family members of her own, Rutherford said, according to the Daily Memphian: “I hurt every day, and I know y’all hurt much more. I know I can’t apologize enough for the pain I caused you all. I took a life away, and it tore me to pieces.”
After the four victim impact statements were read Monday, the judge took a day to think about the situation, then granted Rutherford judicial diversion Tuesday, saying that Rutherford better honor Young’s life by making the most of her “second chance.”
Elliott Young, Galen’s brother, said he understood the power of second chances and that Galen Young himself had benefited from several of those in his own life. Still, Elliott Young said, he wanted to see if Rutherford actually took advantage of hers or not. He said he hoped she would.
Missing Galen
Bobby Lutz, the former Charlotte 49ers basketball coach, once called Young “the best on-ball defender I’ve ever coached. ... If he hand-checked you, you weren’t going anywhere.”
Young was a junior-college transfer to Charlotte who grew up in Memphis. He later made a good living playing basketball overseas in eight different countries and coaching at both the high school and small-college level. He was also the father of two twin boys, now 10 years old, who live with their mother in Iowa.
Young’s funeral and wake in Memphis in 2021 were attended by hundreds of people, according to his sister, including Memphis basketball legends Penny Hardaway and Zach Randolph.
Elliott Young said Wednesday he has been heartened in the nearly two years since Galen’s death how few of the memories of his brother people share are about basketball games.
“When you have a brother who was a phenomenal basketball player, you are prepared for people to mention that,” Elliott Young said. “But they hardly ever mention that. They talk about how they miss the man. The friend. The family member. The coach. The character — because he was a character. He was a phenomenal guy, most of all. And that’s what I miss.”
This story was originally published March 1, 2023 at 2:08 PM.
