A jury has found a 35-year-old McAllen man not guilty of causing a deadly crash more than four years ago.
Jesus Orlando Casal Garza was facing charges of accident involving death, accident involving serious bodily injury and aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for the May 3, 2018, crash that killed Cassandra Rios and seriously injured her brother, Andres Rios.
Casal Garza faced the charge of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon for an allegation that he struck Ramiro Yau with a tire iron following the crash.
He had initially faced an indictment charging him with additional counts of murder and accident involving injury, but prosecutors dismissed those charges prior to the trial, which began last Friday.
The jurors returned the not guilty verdicts on Thursday, court records indicate.
The crash happened just after midnight on May 3, 2018, where the Interstate 2 frontage road intersects with Main Street.
A police report said investigators believed that Casal Garza was driving a white sedan and initiated a chase following a verbal altercation with a passenger in a green SUV in the parking lot of Rio Grande Regional Hospital.
The driver of that SUV, Yau, later told police that his acquaintance, Andres Rios, asked him for a ride to the hospital to “pick something up” and that Cassandra Rios was a passenger in the vehicle’s backseat, according to the report.
That document said Yau left and Casal Garza followed them onto the frontage road, which is when Yau claimed Casal Garza sped up and struck his SUV, causing him to lose control and veer up onto the wall of the overpass before the SUV rolled over onto the curb.
Police had alleged that Casal Garza approached Yau, who had crawled out of the vehicle, and said “Where’s my s—?” before hitting him with a tire iron.
The Rios siblings were trapped in “the crushed and damaged vehicle” and had to be extracted by firefighters.
Following his acquittal, state District Judge Letty Lopez ordered Casal Garza’s release from the Hidalgo County Adult Detention Center.
He had been held without bond since Oct. 25, 2019 after federal authorities arrested him for a charge of transporting firearms by a felon while he was out on bond in the state case.
Casal Garza unlawfully received an AK-47 in March 2019.
He pleaded guilty to that charge on May 14, 2020, and was sentenced to time served for the 386 days he spent in custody.
