The mother of 18-year-old Kayla Gerdes who jumped a curb and drove a passenger van into a Hempstead home— fatally striking the home's 69-year-old owner—defended her daughter yesterday. Tara Gerdes told Inside Edition, "It's your worst nightmare as a parent to have this happen. They're portraying her as a horrible teenaged girl who doesn't care, could care less. It's so not true."
Gerdes told reporters, "It was an accident...It was a mistake!" when being taken from police headquarters, but in her police statement she said, "The thing that made me not feel so bad was, she was old. I mean, 70 years is a long time to live. I want to see a newspaper or the news to see what I look like." When asked about her daughter's callous statement, Tara Gerdes said, "She never said anything like that to me. She said, 'Mommy, this woman has died! How can I live with myself?' My daughter is a very sensitive little girl. We raised her to love and to respect."
Police say that Gerdes was high on Oxycontin and Xanax when driving and that she took over driving from the van's owner, Brian Steele, because she was unhappy with how slow he was going. Gerdes was trying to make a court appearance over jewelry she stole from her mother, and Tara Gerdes said she was going to ask the judge "if I could get my daughter into a rehab program." Gerdes' lawyer adds that it's crazy to think his client was high and that Steele was actually the stoned one, "You're the boss of an 18-year-old girl who is late for court. She is allegedly high, stoned, whatever they are claiming she is, and you pull over to the side of the road and let her drive? She was behind the wheel because he was nodding off, because he was high on drugs."
Gerdes is currently in the medical ward of the jail; she was charged with vehicular manslaughter, DWI, and driving without a license, and is being held on $200,000 bond or $100,000 bail. The victim, Rebecca Twine-Wright, was a retired doctor who had been gardening at the time.
