A man has pleaded guilty to aggravated driving under the influence causing great bodily to his 12-year-old passenger in a crash near Richmond last year and was sentenced to 4½ years in prison.
In exchange for the guilty plea last week, additional charges and cases against Bryan M. Johnston, 36, of Twin Lakes, Wisconsin, were dismissed, including charges of aggravated DUI with a child younger than 16, child endangerment and criminal neglect or abuse of a person with a disability, court records filed in McHenry County court show.
Johnston is required to serve 85% of his prison term. When released, he will serve one year of mandatory supervised release. He will receive credit for 52 days spent in the county jail and a half-day for one day spent working, volunteering or participating in a self-help program, according to the judgment order.
Additional cases he was charged in while out of jail on pretrial release also were adjudicated, including a charge of child endangerment, a Class A misdemeanor, filed in March. This case was dismissed.
Johnston also pleaded guilty in two separate cases filed against him in June that included misdemeanor DUI charges. He was sentenced to jail time, but the time was deemed already served since he was placed in jail custody in August after the new DUI charges, according to the court records.
The original case for which he was sentenced to prison stems from Feb. 12, 2023. Police said that about 10:30 p.m. that night, Johnston was driving drunk with a child in the car who has a disability. Authorities said Johnston did not properly buckle in the child and was involved in a single-vehicle crash in the 7800 block of Tryon Grove Road near Richmond. The crash caused “bodily harm to the child,” the McHenry County Sheriff’s Office said at the time.
A preliminary investigation indicated that the vehicle left the road and hit a ditch embankment, according to earlier reports.
Johnston and the child were taken to Northwestern Medicine McHenry Hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening. The child was transferred to Comer Children’s Hospital in Chicago.
When the crash first occurred, Johnston was charged with misdemeanors that later were upgraded to felonies, records show.
This year, on March 16, Johnston faced a new charge of endangering the life or health of a child, a Class A misdemeanor, court records show. This case involved the same child, now 13, at a restaurant in the village of Lakewood. He allegedly had consumed “detox tea” and alcohol, “causing the alcohol to have extreme effects, while in the presence of his special needs child ... and became unconscious while being the sole caretaker at a restaurant, causing the well-being of” the child to be endangered, according to the complaint.
On June 7, he was charged with DUI and unlawful possession of marijuana as the driver of a motor vehicle. Then, on June 21, he was charged with DUI again. Each case was a Class A misdemeanor, according to the criminal complaints.
Johnston’s attorney declined to comment.