2 days Ago By Silas Morgan
A Sanford man was sentenced to five concurrent life sentences Wednesday in the 2021 hit-and-run killing of a motorcyclist before returning to the scene to fatally run over a good Samaritan assisting the man. Michael John Kraft was sentenced by Judge Michael Rudisill for two counts of vehicular homicide, two counts of DUI manslaughter and two counts of leaving the scene of a crash with a death, according to a news release from Brevard-Seminole State Attorney’s Office spokesperson Matt Reed. A Seminole County jury convicted him March 7 after only 45 minutes of deliberation.
“It was an appropriate, legal sentence that matches the horrific nature of the crime,” said Assistant State Attorney Stewart Stone, one of the prosecutors in the case. Family members of both victims spoke at sentencing about how the killings had a “devastating” impact on their lives, the release said. During trial Stone called Kraft’s actions in March 2021 a “vicious and deadly rampage” that killed two innocent people — including a “caring woman” who stopped to help a stranger.
Kraft, 40, had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. Defense attorneys argued he suffered from mental illness and was in a “psychotic state” during the events that killed motorcyclist Vincent Russo and Jenica Campbell, a married mother of four young girls. Toxicology tests taken 11 hours after the midday incidents showed he had substantial amounts of methamphetamine and amphetamine in his blood.
In opening arguments, Assistant Public Defender Michael Schoenberg told the six-member jury that Kraft thought people in a separate car were chasing him as he headed east on State Road 46. Driving a blue Jaguar, he struck Russo near Summerlin Avenue, sending him sprawling to the pavement. He continued on then cut across several lanes of traffic and made a sudden U-turn at East Lake Mary Boulevard, according to police records.
Witnesses told police he raced back to the scene, revved his engine, drove over the median and struck Campbell, 39, with his car and sent her flying into a ditch. Kraft then drove through a security fence at the northern perimeter of Orlando Sanford International Airport, sped along a utility road and crashed in a ditch where police arrested him at gunpoint, according to court records. In dismissing his defense of insanity, Stone pointed out to the jury “his very first words” as police arrested him were: “If I am legally incapacitated, how can I be charged with a crime?” “If he was truly insane, he would not say such a thing,” he said.
“Mr. Kraft knew what he did and that it was wrong. And that is the exact opposite of insanity.
”.
