UPDATE: Larry Plovetsky will serve one month to two years in Indiana County Jail along with six months probation for his guilty plea.
Joshua Cook was sentenced to six months probation.
In Indiana County Court today, sentencing is scheduled for several defendants, including 43-year-old Larry Plovestsky of Black Lick, who pleaded guilty to reduced charges related to an accident that took the life of an 80-year-old woman in November of 2015.
In January of this year, Plovestsky pleaded guilty to careless driving (unintentional death), recklessly endangering another person, driving under the influence, and operating a vehicle without financial responsibility. Charges of homicide by vehicle while DUI, homicide by vehicle, accidents involving death or injury, DUI controlled substance, and driving offenses were not prosecuted.
Plovestky’s SUV collided head-on with a car driven by Clara Mae Santus of Black Lick on the afternoon of November 19th, 2015. He was turning left from Old William Penn Highway onto Strangford Road when the crash occurred.
In February of last year, Judge William Martin granted a defense request to suppress the evidence of Plovestky’s blood draw, ruling that procedural problems with the blood evidence and with a form that Plovetsky signed discredited the commonwealth’s case. The blood draw turned up evidence of marijuana, but it could have been in his system for days before the crash.
State Superior Court upheld Martin’s decision in June, ruling that the blood draw was “the fruit of the poisonous tree” that would be the foundation of the prosecution’s case.
Also in county court today, 43-year-old Joshua Zen Cook of Parkersburg, West Virginia, will be sentenced for a single guilty plea to theft by deception in a ten-year-old case for which 53 other offenses will not be prosecuted. Cook skipped bail in 2009 and was finally brought back to Indiana County this January. He and a Black Lick woman were accused of raiding the credit card account of the woman’s relative between October of 2008 and February of ’09. While the woman has been involved in other court cases since that time, her name does not appear in any court docket sheets related to this crime.
In separate cases, Marlene Bollinger of New Alexandria will be sentenced for receiving stolen property and possession of drug paraphernalia.
33-year-old Frank Ellis Jr. of Braddock will be sentenced for misdemeanor possession of a controlled substance and felony conspiracy to possession with intent to distribute for a December 2015 case. A jury acquitted Ellis of felony charges of possession with intent and criminal use of a communication facility.
