OSCEOLA COUNTY, Fla. – A 16-year-old boy turned himself in to authorities on Friday after the Florida Highway Patrol obtained a warrant for his arrest in connection to a 2023 crash in Poinciana that left four people dead, including three children.
Ri’Shard Laroy Ferguson faces charges of crash causing serious bodily injury, no driver’s license and four counts of vehicular homicide, according to FHP. He was behind the wheel of a car that ran a stop sign at a high rate of speed and slammed into the left side of an SUV on Sept. 3, 2023, at the intersection of San Miguel Street and Laurel Avenue, according to troopers.
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News 6 is naming the teen due to the circumstances of the case.
The crash resulted in the deaths of a 50-year-old woman and three children — a 1-year-old girl, 9-year-old boy and 11-year-old girl — as well as the hospitalization of a man in his 50s with serious injuries, all of whom were in the SUV, officials said.
The 16-year-old’s arrest follows that of his father, 68-year-old Richard Ferguson, who is accused of allowing the boy to drive the car.
Sabrina Hernandez, the mother of the three children killed in the crash and the daughter of the woman, said at a vigil shortly after the crash that while she forgave the teen, she still wanted him to be held accountable, as well as for something to be done about traffic offenders and a lack of traffic enforcement in the area.
“Are we not worth it in Poinciana? Do we count at all? What is the difference that you can go into another town and there’s cops everywhere?” she said. “(...) I’m not going to stop until I get justice for my family. Because the same way he went ahead and ate the stop sign and killed my family, he still got to wake up today and my family didn’t.”
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Ri’Shard Laroy Ferguson was taken into custody at the county’s Juvenile Detention Center while his father has been booked into the Osceola County Jail, troopers said.
At Richard Ferguson’s first appearance in court on Thursday, the judge set his bond at $60,000, or $15,000 for each of the four vehicular manslaughter charges he faces.