A man will spend a year in prison for hitting a 17-year-old female in April with his truck while he was intoxicated as she was walking on a South Bend sidewalk.
38-year-old Gregory Durling had been driving on Mishawaka Avenue, near Longfellow Avenue. 17-year-old Gabrielle Parkhurst of Goshen was walking into a coffee shop with her sister and mother when Durling’s truck hit her, pushing her through a building’s brick wall.
Durling, a former chemistry and biochemistry graduate student at Notre Dame, told police that an hour earlier he had injected a cocaine mixture.
Gabrielle spent three months in Memorial Hospital, undergoing 15 surgeries. Her mother, Rhonda Parkhurst, recalled what happened that day.
”There was bricks on top of her so I was pulling the bricks off. And Gwyn, my daughter Gwyn, he just narrowly missed her. I saw her weave. It was seconds. And then she called 911 because I couldn’t, I was in utter shock. I didn’t know what to think or feel, and then I heard her voice say, ‘Somebody help me.’ I was trying to get the bricks off her because she couldn’t breathe.”
On Friday St. Joseph Chief Superior Judge Elizabeth Hurley sentenced Durling, who had pleaded guilty, to a year in prison followed by four years of community corrections. He’ll lose his driver’s license for four years.
Parkhurst says she cried a lot Sunday night because she’s feeling conflicted about the sentence. On one hand she said it seems like a slap on the wrist, but she’s also OK with it, because of the remorse Durling has shown and the fast forgiveness that Gabrielle has shown him.
”He’s been suffering from addiction for a long time and the prison time doesn’t make Gabby better. It doesn’t make our family more whole.”
But she says Durling took a lot from her daughter. Because she kept getting infections in the hospital, Gabrielle missed her church confirmation that she had been preparing months for and she didn’t get to walk with her classmates at graduation. Her leg will be permanently disfigured.
“She’s a strong girl. Not once did she say ‘why me?’ Not once did she get mad at God. Not once did she curse him. But in her statement, it was beautiful, she said, ‘I hope you can learn to forgive yourself because I already did. I did when I woke up,’ she said.
"We all made statements and I feel like, between all three of us, we told Mr. Durling what we felt. And the fact that he was just weeping and weeping and weeping, it makes it hard to want anything worse for him. I mean, he’s a person. He made a mistake. He was terrified. He feels like a monster. And Gabby doesn’t feel like he’s a monster.”
