AUBURN, Maine — Harvest Hill Farm, the Mechanic Falls property where Cassidy Charette, 17, of Oakland died after a trailer she was riding on overturned Oct. 11, 2014, pleaded guilty to one count of aggravated driving to endanger, a Class C felony.
In exchange for the guilty plea, the Androscoggin County district attorney’s office dropped a Class A manslaughter charge against the company, according to the farm’s attorney, Michael Whipple of Portland.
The farm’s owner, Peter Bolduc, who was not personally charged in the case, did not address the court, his attorney said after the hearing.
The business also was ordered to pay a $7,500 fine, Whipple said. All but $575 of the fine was suspended under the condition that the farm donate the remaining $6,925 to charity.
Harvest Hill also is expected to be ordered to pay restitution to companies that insured the victims, according to Whipple. A hearing to determine the exact amount of restitution to be paid was set for Aug. 25, 2017.
The farm, mechanic Philip Theberge, 39, of Norway and driver David Brown, 56, of South Paris were charged with reckless conduct, a misdemeanor punishable by up to nearly a year in jail. Brown was found not guilty in September after a four-day trial. The charge against Theberge was dropped last month.
Settling the criminal case against Harvest Hill, filed in July in Kennebec County Superior Court, will allow a civil lawsuit filed by Charette’s parents against the farm, Bolduc, Brown and Theberge to go forward.
“The admission of guilt in this criminal case validates what we have known from the early stages of the investigation — that the incident at Harvest Hill Farms on Oct. 11, 2014, was not just an unavoidable accident as some have suggested,” the Charettes’ attorney Jodi Nofsinger of Lewiston told the court. “Rather it was a tragedy that could have and should have been prevented. Cassidy Charette’s sudden passing on that night resulted from the fact that Harvest Hill Farms was knowingly operating in a negligent, unsafe manner.”
Nofsinger also read a statement from Cassidy Charette’s parents. It was written from the girl’s perspective.
“I am Cassidy,” it said. “I am not ‘that girl in the hayride’ accident you read about in the newspaper. I’m not ‘the victim’ legislators and lawyers use in their briefings; and I’m not just the person who is notably missing in this courtroom. I cannot be reduced to words or works. My spirit is too big.”
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