Woman Charged with Causing Serious Accident in Burnsville

A Golden Valley woman has been charged with causing an accident in Burnsville last weekend that left a driver seriously injured, with broken bones in his back and a dislocated hip.

Maria Elena Case, 29, is charged with criminal vehicular operation resulting in great bodily harm, a felony with a maximum penalty of five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. 

Case, whose blood-alcohol level registered .287 percent shortly after the accident – three and a half times the legal limit – remains in the Dakota County Jail on a $60,000 bond.

According to the criminal complaint, police were called to the intersection of Cliff Road East and Nicollet Avenue South in Burnsville just after 9 a.m. July 7 on a report of a serious crash. 

The first officer to arrive found a pickup truck and a car that appeared to have been involved in an accident. The driver of the pickup told police that he wasn’t injured, but the driver of the car had suffered serious injuries and was unable to get out of the vehicle, according to the complaint.

A third car was stopped in front of the injured driver’s vehicle. The man driving the pickup told the officer that the woman driving the third car, later identified as Case, was sitting on a nearby curb.

The officer approached Case and tried to question her, but she didn’t respond. Another witness, who had been driving an 18-wheeler, confirmed that Case had been driving the car in front of the injured man’s car.

The man in the pickup told police that he had been eastbound on Cliff Road, approaching Nicollet, when he saw the injured man’s car get rear-ended and pushed into oncoming traffic. He said he collided with the injured man’s car because there was a car in the lane next to him and he wasn’t able to change lanes to avoid a crash.

Another officer asked Case if she had been involved in the accident, and she said she had. She said she was westbound on Cliff Road, but she couldn’t remember anything else.

Case told police that she was headed home to Golden Valley after being out the night before at a friend’s house. An officer, noting her “glassy stare” and slurred speech, asked if she had been drinking; she said she was “a sober driver the night before,” according to the complaint.

Case’s blood-alcohol content registered .287 percent on a preliminary breath test, the complaint says, and she was arrested.

The accident victim suffered broken bones in his back and a dislocated hip. Doctors had to put a pin in his left knee, and he had no feeling in his left foot after the accident, according to the complaint.

An omnibus hearing in the case is scheduled Aug. 6 in Dakota County District Court in Hastings.