Moorestown teen gets prison for fatal crash

A Moorestown teenager was sentenced to four years in prison yesterday for his role in a 2007 drunken-driving crash that killed his best friend.

Daniel Friedmann, 19, also will lose his driving privileges for 10 years as part of his sentence following his Nov. 14 guilty plea to charges of vehicular homicide, assault by auto and driving while intoxicated in the death of Evan Welch, 18.

With his blood-alcohol level at twice the legal definition of drunken driving, Friedmann swerved and crashed his car into a tree on Garwood Road in Moorestown. Welch and another friend, who survived, were in the car. Police said they found dozens of beer cans inside.

Friends and relatives speaking in Burlington County Superior Court described Welch and Friedmann as typical Moorestown teens who studied, played video games, and watched sports together. Friedmann's older brother Matthew said that when he left for college in 2005, Welch practically moved into his room.

Joan Welch said Friedmann would have to face consequences for her son's death in the Dec. 9, 2007, accident, "but I don't want him to be beaten down. He didn't go out there that night thinking, 'I'm going to hurt my friend Evan.' "

Defense attorney Michael Riley and friends and relatives speaking on behalf of Friedmann sought a lighter sentence, pointing out that he had no history of alcohol abuse or poor driving. They noted his remorse and raised the possibility of his peers forgetting - and thus failing to learn from - Friedmann's mistake if he was in prison.

"You could sentence him to 100 years and you couldn't punish him as much as he already punished himself," Riley said.

Judge Thomas S. Smith Jr. said he had little discretion in sentencing Friedmann, who could have received up to 10 years as a second-degree offender. Though Friedmann pleaded guilty to second-degree vehicular homicide, he was sentenced as a third-degree offender as part of a plea agreement, Smith said.

In a letter read by Riley, Friedmann accepted responsibility for the accident, apologized to the Welch family, and said he loved Welch, with whom he had hung out almost daily.

"Evan was my best friend for the last 13 years and I will never have another friend like him. . . . He was the best person I ever knew," he wrote.

Friedmann said in the letter that he no longer attended parties with alcohol. Others who spoke in the courtroom worried that some of their peers in the Class of 2008 had continued drinking and partying.

Science teacher Erin Todd, who taught Friedmann and siblings of Welch, said she has listened to students brag about what they did over the weekend, and wonders if Friedmann's prison sentence is the best that can be done to make a difference.

Friedmann, she said, "will be out of sight and out of mind."

Welch's father, Michael, said yesterday: "I feel a physical part of me is gone.

"I frequently ask myself, 'Where is my Evan?' " he said.

He knows where his son is, he added, but "part of me wants to keep looking."