From the Family Seat: Six Days

By Michel Shane · Thu Sep 10 2026

Six days. The four families were six days from jury selection. Suits chosen, work arranged, three years of waiting pointed at one morning. On Tuesday, in a Van Nuys courtroom, the date moved to December 1. On paper, a continuance is procedure: ninety days, a line on a docket. In a family, it is a different kind of arithmetic. I know because I have lived this math. Emily, my daughter, was thirteen when she was killed on PCH in 2010, and I spent twenty-six months inside a courtroom afterward, through a trial, a hung jury, and a retrial. I can tell you what a delay does. Grief holds its breath for a date. When the date moves, you keep holding.

Here is what happened, exactly and only what the record shows. The prosecution presented a new theory involving a 10- to 12-pound nitrous oxide canister recovered from the car, contending it was on Fraser Bohm's lap and may have distracted him. The prosecution stated it is not alleging he inhaled it. Judge Thomas Rubinson said he will not permit any suggestion to the jury that he was, not even, in the judge's words, a nod and a wink. The defense asked for time to inspect the canister and its chain of custody, sought January, and got December 1. Bohm has pleaded not guilty to four counts of murder and four counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence, and a jury will decide.

Ninety days will now fill with speculation about that canister. Not here. The judge drew a line on what a jury may hear because verdicts must be based on evidence. This series holds the same line. The families have to live inside whatever gets said between now and December, and I learned in my own twenty-six months that the rumors hurt almost as much as the delays. The families of Niamh Rolston, Peyton Stewart, Asha Weir and Deslyn Williams will read enough guessing out there. They will not read it in this column.

And December is a date, never a promise. The defense wanted January. Motions remain to be heard; rulings can be appealed; and dates that were moved once can be moved again. This is the part of a trial nobody prepares a family for: the waiting does not accumulate; it restarts. Every new date calls for the same held breath as the first. And honesty requires saying there is a fifth family holding its breath too. Whatever a jury decides Fraser Bohm owes, his family is also living inside this calendar, and a continuance spares no one who loves anyone in that courtroom.

There is heavier arithmetic underneath it. Alan Jackson has argued from the beginning that this is a manslaughter case and has never been a murder case. Understand what that difference means in years. California sets gross vehicular manslaughter without intoxication at two, four or six years a count. Hold those numbers next to four lives, four graduations that never came, four weddings no one will attend. I sat through two trials to reach a verdict in my daughter's case, and I can tell you that no number the law produces returns anything. But I also know I do not have it in me to imagine carrying a small one. These families may be asked to.

And someone should tell them the part nobody told us: a verdict is a date too, never an ending. In my daughter's case, the sentence was fifteen years to life. Here is what life meant. Ten years into the sentence, he applied for parole and was denied, told he could try again in three years. He was back in one, and parole was granted. Governor Newsom reversed it. A year later it was granted again, and even then release is not a door opening; the state takes months to process a man out. Fifteen years and one day after Emily was killed, it was over. Three times we were called into those hearings to argue that the sentence should keep meaning what it said, and three times we reopened everything we had learned to carry. The calendar these families entered three years ago does not close at a verdict. It changes names.

What the calendar now asks of them is specific. Before opening statements, they will pass the third anniversary of October 17. Then Thanksgiving, a table with an empty chair, set one more time before a single juror is sworn. Whatever December decides, it cannot give any of that back. A deadly road does not absolve a driver. A driver's conviction does not acquit the road. Both of those questions now wait until winter. The families do not get to adjourn. Neither does the road. It kept its docket all along, and it takes from all of us.

Justice was not denied on Tuesday. It was rescheduled. Grief keeps its original calendar.