---

Even when a jury can  be shown  videotape from a surveillance camera, showing a hit and run fatality as it happened, it is still possible the jury might not agree the offense was murder or even manslaughter.  In the trial of a pickup truck driver running over a person at the freeway convenience store/gas station on Kettle River Boulevard, in Wyoming last June—the jury could not come to a verdict that defendant Mark Andrew Wiosky, 38, acted intentionally.

After 16 and a half hours of deliberation, the Chisago County Attorney was advised early this week the 12 member jury acquitted (not guilty)Wiosky on criminal vehicular homicide and leaving the scene, and a manslaughter and motor vehicle operation with any amount of meth charges were dismissed.

“We respect the jury’s decision,” said County Attorney Janet Reiter in an e-mail to the Press.  She added prosecutors did not believe another trial would result in convictions.

The defense attorney for Mark Wiosky,  stressed a number of things that a killer just would not have done.  in his closing statements late last week. 

Defense lawyer Michael Padden pointed out Wiosky turned himself in, upon learning the woman he ran over at the gas station June 22, 2023 had died.   

His client cooperated for a blood test.  He admitted in an interview to using meth an hour before the incident last summer.  

Padden told jury members Wiosky’s actions were never “intended” to cause  fatal injury.  He said law enforcement “misperceived’ the situation, assessing the situation as a rolling domestic.   

The victim, Heidi White, was portrayed by the defense as obsessed  with her boyfriend Wiosky.  Padden said she positioned her vehicle in the park & ride, near the gas station, waiting for Wiosky. 

His client only left the scene as quickly as he did, not because of “indifference” as the prosecution maintained, but because he  wanted to put distance between them.

The Assistant Chisago County Attorney countered in his closing remarks that this is the equivalent of the ‘blame the victim’ tactic; the “Look what you made me do to you” excuse.

Wiosky was responsible for plenty of bad choices himself, the prosecutor told the jury.   At a number of key moments Wiosky “escalated” the chain of events.  He grabbed the victim’s car keys from her parked vehicle,  he put the pickup into gear as White stood beside it when he knew there was imminent danger of an injury.  

Wiosky did not testify in his trial, but investigators testified he had told them he thought when White dropped away from clutching the pickup side door, that she’d “hurt her knee.”  Wiosky tossed the victim’s car keys out of his truck and took off.

The medical examiner said White’s head trauma was so severe that even if the injury had been sustained right outside of a medical center, there would have been no way to save her.

---