Scott Swanson
A Junction City man who was convicted in June by a Linn County Circuit Court jury of killing two Sweet Home teens while driving drunk on Highway 228 was sentenced last week to nearly 15 years in prison.
A 12-member jury found Austyn Hillsman, now 22, guilty on June 11, after a four-day trial, of two counts of second-degree manslaughter, third-degree assault, driving under the influence of intoxicants and reckless driving.
Judge David Delsman sentenced Hillsman to 75 months in prison for each of the manslaughter convictions, and 28 months for the assault charge, with no possibility of sentence reduction.
The sentence includes credit for the year-plus the convicted man has spent in Linn County Jail since his arrest following the crash.
Hillsman was driving a Ford F-250 pickup eastbound shortly after midnight on the morning of May 23, 2020 when his vehicle collided with a Honda Pilot operated by Caleb Simonis, 19, near Milepost 10 in the Sunset Lane area of Highway 228, east of Brownsville.
Simonis, whose sisters Shelby, 16, and Kylie, 15, were passengers in the vehicle, were making a late-night run to their mother Amy Simonis’ veterinary clinic in Brownsville with an injured dog.
Both Caleb and Shelby Simonis died following the crash, and Kylee was severely injured.
Judge David Delsman received letters from a friend and an aunt of the victims, as well as from Hillsman’s grandmother, who requested leniency for him.
Glenn Schumacher of Crawfordsville wrote that Hillsman was driving “so manically that he frightened a woman driving home from work, so much so that she called the police on him,” noting that Hills-man’s actions “appear overwhelmingly negligent to me.”
He added that he had hunted with Caleb Simonis and his father, Jim Simonis, and that his family shared an interest in horseback riding, particularly mules, with the Simonis family. Shelby Simonis, he noted, won a grand championship in 2018 at Mule Days in Bishop, Calif., the largest mule show in the world.
He and the Simonises’ aunt, Shannon Snyder of Vancouver, Wash., emphasized the closeness of the family, particularly the siblings, whom both described as talented and on the path to becoming “amazing” people, as Snyder put it.
“There will forever be an emptiness in their hearts, a huge hole that can never be filled,” she wrote.