150 arrests, 11 DWIs and, now, 1 dead 4-year-old

Gregory Wynn came to in a hospital room in September 1983, battered from a car crash. His buddy Steve was in the next room in a coma. A nurse deflected questions about two friends in the car, who were dead.

St. Louis police detectives told him a driver named Ricky Weeden had sped through a red light and plowed into their car.

“They said they thought he had been drinking,” said Wynn, who escaped serious injury.

Police did not document any alcohol use. Prosecutors passed on filing a manslaughter charge.

It was the start of a trend. For the next three decades, Weeden drove recklessly. He was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving 11 times. But police, prosecutors and judges never kept him off the road for very long.

Now authorities say he has killed a child.

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His son, Ricky Weeden Jr., said his father was “not a monster” but a “pillar of the community” who provided many people in north St. Louis County with jobs in their family construction business. He said his father did not have a drinking problem.

The record says otherwise. The state revoked Weeden Sr.’s drivers license in 1993, but Weeden kept driving, without insurance, speeding, running stop lights, swerving out of his lane, throwing beer cans out of his car window, giving police chase. He was arrested by 21 police departments in St. Louis County, sometimes berating and threatening officers. His ex-wife said he was pepper sprayed so many times, he was losing his vision.

In the last 30 years, he has been arrested about 150 times, almost always while driving in north St. Louis County. Six of his 11 DWI arrests resulted in convictions: four times on misdemeanors and two on felonies. He has served fewer than two years total in prison on the DWI charges. (He also has served time in prison on gun charges.)

more . . . http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/arrests-dwis-and-now-dead--year-old/article_33623393-92e4-5976-8ab2-96d43e77aec0.html