It's prison for former wrestling star

COEUR d’ALENE — When Ian Bolstad won the 2012 state high school wrestling championship, it showed he could set goals and achieve them through hard work and dedication.

Last summer, however, when Bolstad, 24, drove at speeds of around 100 mph passing cars on the shoulder of Interstate 90 while he was high on meth and having a schizophrenic episode, eventually causing a crash that almost killed two people, it showed the chasm that had formed between his days on the mat and that one afternoon behind the wheel.

Kootenai County public defender Anne Taylor reincarnated her client’s wrestling career at Shorecrest High in Shoreline, Wash., to show the court Monday at Bolstad’s sentencing that the defendant isn’t the irresponsible monster he has been made out to be.

Bolstad was sentenced in Coeur d’Alene’s First District Court to between nine and 15 years in prison after pleading guilty to one count of aggravated DUI.

Taylor said Bolstad had asked her not to argue for a lesser sentence because he deserved to go to prison.

The nine-year fixed sentence was not what the victims, Ellen Brown and Joelle Tanguay, or their relatives hoped for. They had earlier asked the court to impose at least a 15-year fixed prison term — the maximum for the felony charge. A second charge had been dismissed through a plea agreement.

Eight months after the July 27 accident in which Bolstad’s pickup truck crashed with a Subaru Outback near the Northwest Boulevard exit, Joelle Tanguay, the passenger in the Outback, remains in a Seattle hospital, a quadrapalegic. Her mother, Ellen, the car’s driver, is still healing the multiple broken bones that resulted from the crash.

Almost a dozen motorists reported to police that the blue Toyota pickup Bolstad had driven east that Thursday afternoon last summer on I-90 from Barker Road in the Spokane Valley, where it clipped a semitrailer truck hauling automobiles.

The pickup continued toward Idaho, driving erratically as it crossed the state line. Reaching speeds estimated at 100 mph and passing cars on the shoulder, Bolstad lost control of the pickup truck around 3:30 p.m. in Coeur d’Alene. It rammed the Subaru — in which a mother and daughter on a ladies weekend were heading to a musical event at Sanders Beach. The big Toyota Tundra was traveling around 92 mph, according to police, when it pushed the Outback into a construction zone, smashing it between a concrete barrier and a steel post. Both Tanguay and Brown had to be extricated.

Bolstad, who wasn’t injured, fought police until troopers Tazed him twice. The interstate was closed for three hours.

Since that day, Tanguay, 34, has been in nine hospitals in four states with a hole in her spinal cord that leaks fluid, and breathing through a tracheal tube. Barker has trouble walking and is in constant pain. Joseph Tanguay, Joelle’s dad, closed his construction business and has spent more than $40,000 since last summer to be by his daughter’s side. Medical bills have piled into the hundred of thousands of dollars, family members said.

When she visited Joelle in the hospital, Joelle’s aunt Paula Acosta watched her formerly vibrant niece mouth the words, “I want to die,” Acosta said. Before the wreck, Joelle worked at her dream job helping disabled children, Acosta added.

In a statement to the court that took months to write using alphabetical cards, Tanguay said she and her family’s lives have been shattered by the senseless crash.

“I used to be able to walk and talk and run and sing,” she said. “Now I hope to one day drive my own wheelchair.”

Taylor said her client, who has a limited criminal history including two burglaries, and whose drug use resulted in stints in mental hospitals where he was diagnosed with schizophrenia, has insight, is remorseful and can handle adversity.

“He is responsible,” she said. “He instructed me not to ask for a rider. He thinks he should go to prison.”

District Judge Lansing Haynes said the crash was the result of criminal activity — buying methamphetamine — and mixing it with a standing mental health issue.

“This is a crime that was motivated by preventable criminal activity and one that has had indescribable consequences,” Haynes said.