From Tampa Bay Times
LARGO — Janet Nusspickel was driving a school bus to Northeast High School when she got the call. It was a police officer who said he needed to talk to her soon and in person.
“I knew then that something was terribly wrong … as only a mother can know,” she said in a court hearing Tuesday.
But she had a job to do. She drove to the next stop, and then got a call from her husband. He said their daughter Diana had been killed in a car crash.
Somehow, she finished her route. “I had a bus full of kids I had to get to school,” she said.
She then had to go home and tend to her 4-year-old granddaughter. “I had to tell her that Mommy had gone up to heaven.”
Nusspickel was recounting the day for Pinellas-Pasco Circuit Judge Nancy Moate Ley, who on Tuesday sentenced the drunken driver responsible to 26 years in prison.
Earlier in the hearing, Scott Michael Nicholson pleaded guilty to two counts of DUI-manslaughter and one count of reckless driving with serious bodily injury in connection with the June 2011 crash.
Nicholson, 31, was driving …MORE