Last week a divided 5-4 State Supreme Court ruled that an Auburn woman cannot be charged as an accomplice to the single-car crash that took six young lives in July 2001 near the Auburn SuperMall because she was also a victim of that crash.

Today Auburn City attorney Dan Heid, who maintains that Teresa Hedlund encouraged the driver to act out by filming him in the moments leading up to the crash, is weighing his dwindling legal options.

Clearly, it was not the outcome Heid had hoped for.

“Was I disappointed with the decision?” Heid said. “Well, yes I was. The police worked very hard to put a good case together. The facts of this case were as horrendous as any facts that can be and are prosecuted in district and municipal courts.”

What prompted Heid to prosecute Hedlund, he said, was that “she promoted Tom Stewart’s irresponsible driving by multiple activities,” among them providing the alcohol, providing the party before hand, and participating with other people in a competitive use of the video camera to see who could be more outlandish.

“She didn’t need to get into the car, this four-person car that had seven people in it,” Heid said. “By getting into the car, she prevented the smallest person, Jayme Vomenici, who happened to be the only sober person and the driver of the vehicle, from driving everybody home, which is what she had told her mother was going to happen.”

When Hedlund got into the car, Heid said, there was a disturbance described in the testimony at trial about who was going to drive.

“There is no way in the world that Jayme Vomenici would have been able to drive a four-person car that had seven people in it. If Ms. Hedlund had not done that, we may have only been looking at charges of furnishing liquor and furnishing tobacco,” Heid said.

“…What the court concluded was that because of the wording of the statute — even though Ms. Hedlund became a victim after whatever she did was done and the car careened into the concrete pillar — she could not be charged as an accomplice. That was the position that five out of the nine justices agreed with, but four did not agree with. All I can say is that my arguments were more consistent with the four people, not the five people.”