Dennis Leporin won a minor victory in court this week, 54 weeks after he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for killing Chelsea D. Fredrickson, 19, in a wrong-way, head-on accident two years ago.
Cole County Circuit Judge Dan Green on Wednesday denied Leporin's motion to set aside or correct the judgment or sentence Leporin filed last October - but granted Leporin's request to set aside a driving while intoxicated conviction and four-year sentence.
Green's order leaves in place Leporin's other two sentences - 24 years for his guilty plea to second-degree murder, to be followed by six years for his guilty plea to second-degree assault.
Jefferson City police reported after the accident that Leporin was eastbound in the westbound lanes of U.S. 54 and driving with his headlights off, when his 1999 Ford Ranger ran into Fredrickson's 2003 Saturn Ion, just west of the Route B/Missouri 179 overpass.
Fredrickson, of Camdenton, died March 6, 2013, as she was driving home after working at Lutz's Barbecue on Missouri Boulevard, where she had worked for about nine months.
Her boyfriend, Jasper J. Richmond, was a passenger in the car and received serious, permanent injuries.
In a probable cause statement filed with the original charges, Officer Andrew Lenart reported Leporin's "eyes were watery and there was a strong odor of an intoxicating beverage" when the officer first met Leporin, still seated in his truck waiting for emergency responders to pry his door open.
Lenart wrote Leporin said he'd had a couple of drinks.
Later, at the hospital, the probable cause statement reported Leporin made statements to officers that "I was in a horrible wreck that I caused" and he was "really wasted."
During last year's sentencing hearing, Cole County Prosecutor Mark Richardson told Green that Leporin had a blood-alcohol content level of 2.5 - three times the state's legal limit - when he was tested more than an hour after the accident.
Richardson also told Green last year that, after drinking heavily at the Lake of the Ozarks, Leporin had turned down his girlfriend's request to spend the night at her Eldon apartment - and had stopped to buy more alcohol before the accident happened at 9:55 p.m. March 6.