Farmer sentenced for 4 OWI deaths

Judge Raymond Huber sentenced Scott Farmer to 37 1/2 years in prison on Friday, Nov. 22 at the Waupaca County Courthouse.

“The court recognizes there is nothing it can do to bring back the loss of these four precious children. The court can simply protect the public from this ever happening again and punish the defendant the behaviors on this occasion,” said Huber.

On the evening of Dec. 16, 2023, Farmer turned left from Little River Road and into the lane of oncoming traffic on U.S. Highway 10. He crashed into an SUV and killed four siblings: Daniel Gonzalez, 25, his brother Fabian Gonzalez, 23, and their sisters, Lilian Gonzalez, 14, and Daniela Gonzalez, 9.

Farmer was heavily intoxicated and had an open bottle of vodka in his truck at the time of the crash. He pleaded no contest to homicide by intoxicated use of a motor vehicle. This was his fifth operating-while-intoxicated offense. If he is released from prison decades from now, Farmer will be placed on extended supervision for more than 20 years.

He was credited for 342 days during his time in jail on a $750,000 cash bond. The sentence is composed of nine years incarceration for each count of homicide by intoxicated use of a vehicle. These will be served consecutively and another 1 1/2 years was included for the OWI charge.

The sentencing started at 9 a.m. and finished late afternoon with a one-hour recess. Half the room was packed with family and extended families of Pastor Kurt Schilling and his wife Paulina Gonzalez, the mother of the four who died in the car crash. Paulina Gonzalez and her children are from Ecuador. On the other side of the courtroom were the friends and family of Scott Farmer.

On the television screen was Jorge Gonzalez, the eldest brother who lives in Ecuador and joined the hearing via computer camera. The court rotated through three Spanish translators throughout the day. One was present in the courtroom and two other translators were remote. Every person that spoke did so in a couple sentences and then paused for the Spanish-to English or English-to-Spanish translation.

Scott Farmer, 48, entered the courtroom in handcuffs and leg shackles. When he was booked in jail a year ago he was a clean-shaven man but now he had a scruffy beard and long hair. He kept his head down throughout the hearing.

Paulina Gonzalez spoke of her empty house that was no longer filled with joy and how it was a living nightmare. Jorge Gonzalez talked about his love for his siblings and the oddness on the night when he tracked his brother’s vehicle on his smartphone in Ecuador and noticed it was near their Weyauwega home but it was strangely stopped.

Kurt Schilling talked of how this family formed and the life they built together. He spoke proudly as a stepfather of his children’s work ethic and success as students. Schilling spoke of the fear and trepidation a parent feels when their children are coming home late. There was a gut-sick sense of something wrong, one of building dread. He and Paulina drove to the accident scene and knew what happened without being told what happened. He was instructed to drive to city hall in Weyauwega and when he pulled out he noticed three body bags in the rear-view mirror.

Luis Gonzalez, a cousin, spoke on behalf of the extended Gonzalez family. Family get-togethers are no longer the same. He described how his cousin’s skulls were crushed and bodies were mangled from the violent impact. He demanded justice for the horror and loss inflicted by Scott Farmer.

A 12-minute video montage of the Gonzalez siblings was played in the darkened courtroom. There were two sounds: the voices of the dead siblings and the sound of quiet weeping in the audience.

Defense attorney John Miller Carroll called on Paul Hyland of Forte Investigations. He took the stand and described the various models (COMPAS and the Ohio Model of Assessment) used during the sentencing process.

When it was his time to speak, Scott Farmer said he was remorseful and sorry multiple times “There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think of this and I wish would have died instead of them,” said Farmer.

Farmer’s wife, Jamie, took the stand and asked people to look at her husband as a human with some good in him, despite his struggles with alcoholism. “His demons obviously won that evening and that’s something Scott has to live with the rest of his life,” she said.

Earlier in the day, District Attorney Kat Turner described Farmer’s lengthy history of being in and out of rehab. He did 11 stints in various treatment programs. He had many chances to turn his life around.