Nightmare late night car wreck to prison- Lark Hodge

What happens when the justice system doesn’t want to hear the truth?

I sat down with Lark Hodge about a month after she walked out of a Florida prison. She’d served four and a half years for DUI manslaughter. The thing is, her blood alcohol was below the legal limit. The other driver’s? He was at 0.15 with narcotics in his system. He had a lifetime license suspension dating back to 1989. Seventy-five driving infractions after that suspension. Between five and fifteen DUIs on his record.

None of that was admissible at trial.

A Hurricane Kid Turned Sommelier

Before I get into the nightmare, you need to understand who Lark was. She grew up in New Orleans and survived Hurricane Katrina at ten years old. Her mom was a nurse at Memorial Hospital, so the family stayed during the storm. Lark remembers her dad taking her to the top floor after the storm passed. With all the power out across New Orleans, she could see the Milky Way.

Then the levees broke.

“We had no idea what was happening,” Lark told me. “All we can see is the water rising rapidly. We don’t have cell phones, there’s no TV, everybody’s radio is dead.”

They eventually escaped on school buses organized by a SWAT team member from two parishes over. Her dad wrote a book about it. The family bounced around after the storm and finally settled in Northeast Florida.

By twenty, Lark was making more money than her professor father, working at the Omni in Amelia Island. A sommelier noticed her passion for wine and offered her an apprenticeship in Dallas. She got the job. She was supposed to move in eleven days.

Then she got in a car accident.

The Night Everything Changed

Lark had worked a sixteen-hour shift. Around 2 AM, she was driving home on Heckscher Drive, a dark road with no lights and construction everywhere. Sometimes you could drive that road and not pass a single car.

“I have no recollection of the actual accident happening,” Lark said. “All I know is when I woke up, obviously I was in a field of debris and people around me.”

It was a head-on collision at 55 miles per hour. Lark had a traumatic brain injury and a brain bleed. Her left arm was hanging off her body. Her back was broken. The first responders had to use the jaws of life to get her out.

Here’s where the story takes a turn that reads like fiction. The firefighter who arrived on scene? He thought Lark had been ejected from the vehicle because she was covered in marsh mud with twigs in her hair, but her car was in the middle of the road. Years later, a buried 911 call revealed that a first witness had seen Lark’s vehicle get hit by another car. The theory now is she was ejected, crawled back to her car, and got hit again.

That firefighter would later become her husband.

”DUI Manslaughter? What Are You Talking About?”

Lark woke up in the hospital not knowing anyone else was involved in the crash. When she asked if everyone was okay at the scene, they told her they didn’t even see another vehicle. She thought she’d hit a tree.

Her mom broke the news that morning that someone had died.

“My whole body was just convulsing,” Lark said. “I couldn’t believe that someone had passed away.”

Three days later, while she was still hospitalized, the police dropped the bomb. They were impounding her car for DUI manslaughter investigation. They said she had bloodshot watery eyes and a wine bottle in her car.

“I’m like, DUI manslaughter, what are you talking about? That’s crazy,” Lark told me. “Bloodshot watery eyes could also mean that you were in a head-on collision and you just survived.”

The hospital had hit her with so many narcotics they overdosed her twice. They gave her Narcan. She’d lost so much blood she needed transfusions. And somehow an officer noted her bloodshot eyes as evidence.

The Evidence That Never Made It to Trial

Lark’s blood alcohol came back at 0.06, below Florida’s 0.08 legal limit. The other driver, Derek, came back at 0.15 with narcotics in his system.

But that’s not all. Derek had a lifetime license suspension since 1989. He’d been pulled over seventy-five times for driving infractions after that suspension. He had between five and fifteen DUIs. Lark hired a private investigator to dig this up because when she tried to look it up through the Clerk of Courts, “everything was redacted.”

Her first attorney told her with a blood alcohol below the legal limit, they’d never file charges. Then that attorney got hired as second in command at the State Attorney’s office. He dropped her case the same week Derek’s toxicology came back.

Lark found a new attorney, Lewis Fusco. He’d never had a DUI manslaughter case before. They filed eight or nine motions to exclude the hospital blood test as prejudicial. All denied. They filed to admit Derek’s blood alcohol, his history, the drugs in his system.

“Denied,” Lark said. “Denied completely.”

The judge was known as “Hang ‘Em High Healey.”

A Four-Day Trial With Her Hands Tied

The trial lasted four days. For the first two days, Lark’s team felt cautiously optimistic. But without Derek’s history, the jury only heard one side.

“I can’t blame the jury for coming up with the verdict that they did with what was presented to them,” Lark said.

The verdict came back in a little over an hour. Guilty.

The court clerk, who’d been transcribing the case for three years and knew everything the jury didn’t, was devastated. She’s stayed in touch with Lark throughout her incarceration.

After the jury left, Lark lost it. She looked at the state attorneys and let them have it. “You know what you did,” she told them. “You’re the one who obviously is on the other side of this chair. You know all the evidence in front of you and you still came at me the way you did.”

It bit her in sentencing, but she doesn’t regret it.

Five Years In, Six Years Out

The state wanted maximum time. The judge gave Lark five years in prison, six years total with house arrest after. Her kids were eight months and two years old.

She started in orientation camp, which she described as terrible. New prisoners, high emotions, all women.

“My second night there, I saw some stuff that no one should ever see,” she said.

But when she got to her permanent camp at Gadsden, something shifted. She enrolled in a horticulture program and earned a nursery management degree. The warden noticed her working in the greenhouse and recruited her to cook in the cafe. That’s “top of the food chain” in prison, she told me. You eat what you want and you know the right people.

When I asked how she handled the hard days, she mentioned the tablets Florida prisons have. She’d get under a blanket and plug into a podcast or movie. (This show actually streams into 275 prisons on the Adobo platform, so Lark’s story is reaching people in situations just like hers.)

Her kids visited twice a month by the end. Gadsden has a playroom, a playground, board games. Before Lark got out, they had a Sesame Street event where her kids got their nails done and played with the other women.

”I Don’t Feel Responsible”

This is the part of Lark’s story that stays with me. She said something that takes real courage.

“I don’t want to say this and make it seem like I’m an evil person, because I’m not. I do not feel responsible for my car accident. There is a level of remorse that I have for Derek because it’s a loss of life and I am devastated that someone lost their life. But I can’t say that I’m the one who caused it.”

She met other women in prison with DUI manslaughter charges. One of them said something that resonated: “I have thought that I was a monster for so long until I met other women who were DUI manslaughter. And if I can’t look at them like a monster, then I can’t look at myself like that anymore.”

That network saved her. The DUI manslaughter women at Gadsden looked out for each other. When the prison had a motorcycle event, they all surrounded one woman who’d been in a collision with a motorcycle couple. “Are you okay? Are you doing okay mentally? Are you able to handle this?”

Jumping Into a Moving Car

Lark got out on August 20th. Her kids started school the next Monday. She was waking up at 5:30 AM to get them ready, signing in with probation, filling out forms hour by hour, fighting to get her hardship license so she could drive on the farm she and her husband now run in the middle of nowhere.

She came home to cows, gardens, a canning operation, and a plan to get into microgreens. All of it built on skills she learned growing things behind bars.

When I asked for her biggest takeaway from surviving all of this, Lark didn’t hesitate.

“We all have a purpose. Even when you go through the worst and you think there’s nothing that can come out of what you’re going through, I promise you there’s something good. It might take five, seven, ten years down the line for you to figure out what it was. But I promise you, out of that bad, there is something good.”

She’s proof of that. Four and a half years taken from her over a case that never should have been prosecuted the way it was. And she came out the other side a farmer, a mother, a wife, and someone building something real.

That firefighter who pulled her from the wreckage? He waited for her the whole time.