Jurors convicted Erika Martinez-Ramirez after prosecutors said she let her 14-year-old son drive despite earlier warnings from police.
BELLMEAD, Texas — A McLennan County jury convicted Erika Martinez-Ramirez of endangering a child, and a judge sentenced her to two years in prison after prosecutors said she sent her intoxicated 14-year-old son to drive his younger sister on a late-night errand that ended in a fatal crash.
The verdict closed the public part of a case that began in the early hours of July 14, 2024, when a boy too young to hold a license struck and killed 67-year-old bicyclist Dennis Welch, then crashed into a nearby house. The case drew unusual scrutiny because prosecutors said Bellmead police had already warned Martinez-Ramirez more than once about letting the boy drive. It also left key parts of the story out of public view, because Texas law sharply limits what officials can say about juvenile cases.
Prosecutors said the crash happened about 1:30 a.m. after Martinez-Ramirez handed over her keys and told her son to take his 10-year-old sister to a nearby house to pick up clothes. While driving through Bellmead, the boy hit Welch, who was riding a bicycle, and then continued into a house. Welch died at the scene. The girl in the car suffered minor injuries. In describing the investigation, prosecutors said police found that the boy was intoxicated. The district attorney’s office said the trip itself mattered as much as the collision because the mother had made the decision that set it in motion. By the time jurors heard the case this month, the basic timeline had become a central part of the prosecution: a late-night errand, a child passenger, an underage driver and a death on a city street.
Records described by police and local news reports showed the fatal wreck was not the first time officers had found the teen behind the wheel. An arrest affidavit said Bellmead police stopped him on Dec. 12, 2023, for speeding and found other children in the car. Martinez-Ramirez was cited then for allowing her underage son to drive, authorities said. Police said the boy was found driving again on Dec. 24, 2023, after he hit another vehicle and fled. Prosecutors said officers again contacted the mother and told her it was unacceptable to let him drive. One report from 2024 said the earlier stop involved his siblings riding unrestrained, while another said a toddler was in the backseat during the later incident. Those details helped prosecutors argue this was not a single bad choice but a repeated pattern that had already drawn direct police intervention before Welch was killed.
The investigation also widened beyond the mother and son in the days after the crash. Bellmead police announced in July 2024 that the 14-year-old had been detained and charged, though officials have not publicly disclosed the outcome of his case because he is a juvenile. Police also arrested 22-year-old Lisett Andrea Najera on a misdemeanor charge of contributing alcohol to a minor. Officers said she left a liquor bottle unattended, allowing the boy to consume what remained inside, and did not stop him. Public reports released this week focused on Martinez-Ramirez’s trial and sentence and did not provide an updated disposition for Najera’s case. That left one of the case’s side questions unresolved in public: how prosecutors handled the allegation that alcohol had been made available to the teen before he got into the driver’s seat. Even so, the conviction against Martinez-Ramirez turned on her decision to let him drive with a 10-year-old child in the car.
By the time the case reached trial, prosecutors had narrowed the legal theory. Martinez-Ramirez had originally faced a criminally negligent homicide charge after the crash, but the district attorney’s office said it pursued the endangering-a-child count because it carried the same punishment range and was easier to prove. Prosecutors also said they did not charge her with manslaughter because they had no evidence she knew her son was intoxicated when she gave him the keys. The jury returned its guilty verdict on April 7. County Court at Law 1 Judge Vikram Deivanayagam then imposed the maximum sentence of two years in prison. Assistant district attorneys Michaelina Yearty and Duncan Widmann handled the case. Their statements after sentencing underscored how unusual the prosecution was: it was not built around the teen driver’s conduct alone, but around what adults knew, what they had been told before and what choice was made anyway in the minutes before the fatal trip began.
The case left behind a chain of small details that made the outcome harder to dismiss as an isolated mistake. The drive was short. The errand was ordinary. The crash came in the dark, with a younger child in the passenger seat and a bicyclist sharing the road. After the impact, the car did not stop with Welch; it went on into a house, turning a traffic collision into a wider neighborhood emergency. When Bellmead police first announced the arrests in 2024, the department publicly offered condolences to Welch’s family. After the conviction, Yearty and Widmann said, “Parents are rarely prosecuted for crimes committed by their children, but this mother’s actions were so irresponsible and so frequent that both prosecution and a maximum sentence were warranted.” In a second statement, they praised Bellmead police for what they called exceptional work on the case. Taken together, those comments framed the prosecution as a response not only to a deadly crash, but to warnings that officials said had already been given and ignored.
As of now, Martinez-Ramirez has been convicted and sentenced, Welch is identified publicly as the man who died in the crash, and the teen driver’s case remains largely confidential under juvenile law. With the April 7 judgment entered, the next public development is likely to come only if court filings or prosecutors release further information about the adult cases.
Author note: Last updated April 10, 2026.