PALMER — A 21-year-old Wasilla man will serve five years in prison for causing a car wreck that killed a teenager and an unborn baby girl.

Kyle Bissonette had to take a moment to collect himself before he told the accident victims how he felt.

“All I can do is pray that someday you will forgive me for this terrible accident that never should have happened,” he said.

JEREMIAH BARTZ/Frontiersman file photo A Wasilla man has been sentenced to five years in prison for causing a fatal accident last year.

At the time of the wreck he was making bad choices and heading down the wrong path, Bissonette said. Now he’s committed to turning his life around.

Bissonette was one of five people inside the Chevrolet Trailblazer that night last fall. He wasn’t driving. He wasn’t sober enough. His attorney said at Friday’s sentencing hearing that Bissonette was horsing around in the car and jerked the wheel to the right as a 15-year-old drove the vehicle down the Parks Highway. The girl overcorrected, and that’s when the Trailblazer collided head-on with a Plymouth Horizon.

No one escaped the wreck unhurt.

Bissonette was hospitalized, as was the driver and three passengers. One of them, Chelsea Johnston, 16, later succumbed to her injuries. In the other car, Tim Abell and his daughter, Donna Gallant, were also sent to the hospital. Gallant was pregnant and very close to her due date. She lost the baby.

At Friday’s sentencing hearing, Abell stepped up to testify, carrying a cream-colored box he gently placed on the lectern.

“This is my granddaughter. She should be somewhere else besides in this box,” he said. “She should be a year old, bouncing on my knee.”

Abell said that he felt Bissonette should serve as much time as possible. If the Trailblazer had suffered some mechanical failure or hit a patch of ice that would be one thing, he said. But that’s not what happened. This wreck was avoidable.

He said, in his mind, three people died as a result of the wreck, not two.

“Thank God for modern medicine because my daughter would be dead,” he said. “She died twice in the (operating room) getting patched up from this.”

Gallant’s mother, Diane Abell, read a statement from her daughter who, she said, was physically unable to stand at the lectern and testify.

“I didn’t know for three days after the accident that my daughter was gone,” it read, in part. “I can’t stand for long periods of time without my hip or my ankle hurting.”

Gallant’s statement asked for the maximum sentence for Bissonette.

Bissonette’s attorney, Paul Stockler, said his client and his friends had tried to make the right decision before the accident — choosing the soberest among their group to drive. He said right before he left to come to Palmer, he’d thought about how so many kids horse around in cars when they’re young.

“The interesting thing about Mr. Bissonette is that he’s taken he blame for this. He hasn’t tried to blame anyone else,” Stockler said.

Recently, he said, an insurance adjuster came to interview his client. The case, he said, has spawned a pretty serious lawsuit. The adjuster asked questions that seemed to be baiting Bissonette into saying the driver was at fault, that he’d grabbed the wheel to pull her back into her lane. But he didn’t bite.

“She overcorrected after I startled her, but she wasn’t driving in the wrong lane,” he recalled was his client’s version of events.

Assistant District Attorney Rick Allen said the main goal in sentencing Bissonette should be condemning his actions. Bissonette, he said, is by no means a lost cause. He isn’t the type of defendant who needs to be rehabilitated or isolated. But the court did need to send a message.

“We’ve got some conduct that was extremely reckless, extremely inappropriate,” Allen said. “There are consequences for that and they’re serious.”

Allen asked that Bissonette be sentenced to five years in prison. Stockler asked for three. In the end, Smith sided with Allen. He said he’d looked at other cases he’d handled that were similar.

“I hate to say it, but many years ago I had an almost identical case,” Smith said.

A drunk man playfully grabbed the wheel of a van someone else was driving. The van rolled, paralyzing the drunk’s 4-year-old daughter.

“Automobiles are horribly dangerous instruments,” Smith said.

Bissonette wasn’t getting off easy to be sentenced to five years at such a young age and then have three felonies on his record when he gets out.

“It’s horrible that he had to take this lesson. And the victims certainly didn’t deserve having to teach this lesson,” the judge said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.