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State v. Crawford2/4/1999
The defendant, James H. Crawford, appeals pursuant to Rule 3 of the Tennessee Rules of Appellate Procedure from two convictions for reckless aggravated assault as entered in the Criminal Court of Sullivan County. Reckless aggravated assault is a Class D felony, and the defendant is currently serving a six-year sentence in the Department of Correction. In this appeal, he challenges the sufficiency of the evidence and contends that the trial court erred in ordering him to serve the two three-year sentences consecutively. We affirm the judgment of the trial court.
The assaults in this case arose out of the defendant's divorce from his wife, Deronda Baker. The pair divorced in November, 1995 after a marriage of nine years. The divorce court awarded Ms. Baker the mobile home in which they had lived. It was located near the residences of the defendant's father, sister and brother. The divorce, apparently, was a difficult one, and the defendant and his family were bitter not only about Ms. Baker's ownership of the trailer but also because Ms. Baker had charged the defendant with raping her daughter. The defendant's family pooled their resources and purchased the trailer from Ms. Baker sometime before the incident which led to these convictions.
Early on the evening of March 9, 1996, Ms. Baker and her niece, Linda Sue McClain, arrived at the trailer in a full-size, blue Chevrolet pickup that belonged to Ms. McClain's husband. As they arrived, they saw the defendant watching them from the doorway of his father's house. The two women entered the trailer and packed some boxes of groceries and other items that belonged to Ms. Baker. Because they wanted to avoid any confrontations, they kept a close eye on the yard and on the road. Shortly after their arrival, they noticed the defendant leave his father's house in his S-10 pickup truck. He drove very slowly down the road in front of the trailer, and then, about 45 minutes later, he returned, once again driving very slowly. They decided to finish quickly and come back another time. They loaded a kitchen table, four chairs, a rug, and several boxes in the back of the pickup and were seated in the truck when they saw Victor Crawford, the defendant's father, drive down the road. As Ms. McClain turned the truck around in the driveway, the defendant's S-10 pickup came down the driveway to the road. They waited to let the S-10 go by, but the vehicle stopped at the top of the driveway and its headlights were extinguished. When another car came down the road, they decided to follow after it as quickly as possible.
When they pulled out onto the hard top, the defendant's S-10 pickup came right up onto the bumper of the McClain truck in a matter of seconds and followed them closely. The S-10's headlights were continually switched from bright to regular. Ms. Baker called 911 on her cell phone while Ms. McClain contacted her husband on her CB radio. Ms. McClain continued to accelerate in an unsuccessful attempt to increase the distance between the two vehicles. At one point, she ran a stop sign rather than try to stop. The S-10 was following so closely that McClain could not see its headlights in her rearview mirrors. Although both women identified the S-10 as belonging to the defendant, Ms. Baker was unable to identify the driver of the truck. McClain, however, testified that when the S-10's lights were on high beam, its lights reflected back off the bumper of the larger truck and she was able to identify the driver as the defendant.
The S-10 continued to tail-gate down the narrow, twisting road for approximately four miles and "nudged" the bumper of the larger truck three times. As the larger truck rounded a curve, the S-10 attempted
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