PATRIOT GUARD RIDERS ROCK,, SO PROUD I AM A MEMBER OF THIS AWESOME GROUP!!!
Haltom City woman pleads guilty to murder in DWI crash
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Tags: first-degree murders, pleas
Tammy Sue Stegall
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By Domingo Ramirez Jr.
FORT WORTH -- A Haltom City woman with a history of drunken driving convictions was sentenced to 30 years in prison Tuesday for running over and killing a Bedford motorcyclist last year just days after he had buried his son who was killed in Afghanistan.
In a plea agreement reached with prosecutors, Tammy Sue Stegall, 51, pleaded guilty to murder in the traffic death of 56-year-old Billy Stroud.
Stegall was charged with murder because she had two previous DWI convictions, according to Tarrant County criminal court records.
Stegall entered her plea Tuesday afternoon in Criminal District Court No. 371.
She was addicted to heroin and other drugs, family friends have said.
Stegall, who did not have a driver’s license because of her previous DWI convictions, was driving a Nissan Maxima on Aug. 11, 2009 when she rear-ended Stroud’s motorcycle about 10:40 a.m. on East Belknap St. near U.S. 377 (Denton Highway) in Haltom City.
Stroud, who had just bought the motorcycle a few days before the accident, died at John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth shortly after the accident.
Stroud died just three days after the family buried his son, Marine Lance Cpl. Jonathan Stroud, 20, of Oklahoma, who was killed on July 30, 2009 in Afghanistan.
The Bedford father had been so impressed by the Patriot Guard motorcycle riders who had participated in his son’s funeral in Oklahoma that the elder Stroud had bought a motorcycle to join the group, friends and family members have said.
The guard is a group of motorcycle riders who volunteer to participate in the funerals of military personnel.
Stegall has been in trouble with the law since 1982, according to criminal court records.
Court records show that Stegall has been convicted of theft, credit-card abuse, passing forged checks and possession of a controlled substance. Her longest stay behind bars was in 1986, when she was sent to prison for five years for the forged-check convictions, records show.
In August, Stegall drove off in her mother’s car, crashed it in Haltom City and was later convicted of DWI for the second time. Her first DWI conviction was in Fort Worth in September 1994, according to criminal court records.
After that, Stegall mostly had to ride her bicycle any place she needed to go, friends have said.
She bought the Nissan Maxim in the summer of 2009 after she sold her mother’s Haltom City home. Her mother died in June 2009.
Read more: http://www.star-telegram.com/2010/08/11/2397516/haltom-city-woman-pleads-guilty.html#ixzz0wK17PHxn
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