California woman sentenced for fatally running down pregnant woman while high on drugs

With the 3-year-old daughter of the victim in the courtroom, an Orange County woman with three previous convictions for driving under the influence was sentenced to 15 years to life on Friday for killing a pregnant woman that she hit with her car in 2020.

Courtney Fritz Pandolfi, 44, of Garden Grove pleaded guilty in February to two felonies, including murder and driving under the influence of drugs causing bodily injury with two or more priors. She also pleaded guilty to several misdemeanors, prosecutors said.

According to the Orange County Office of the District Attorney, Pandolfi was driving in Anaheim while under the influence of a drug cocktail, including cocaine and methamphetamine, when she jumped a curb around 7:30 p.m. on August 11, 2020.

She plowed into a metal newspaper stand on the sidewalk with her white Jeep SUV before hitting 23-year-old Yesenia Aguilar, who was pregnant and holding hands with her husband on Katella Avenue near Bayless Street.

Pandolfi continued driving even after striking Aguilar. She drove an additional 347 feet before the Jeep became disabled.

Aguilar died from her injuries, but her baby was saved in an emergency C-section. That baby, now a 3-year-old girl, was in court Friday with her father, Aguilar’s widower, James Alvarez.

“Yesenia’s last act on this earth was to do whatever she could to protect her unborn baby,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer. “A beautiful little girl came into the world fighting like hell to survive the tragedy that took her own mother’s life, and the strength that little girl has shown gave her own father the will to live.”

“Adalyn Rose’s first breath will be forever inextricably intertwined with her mother’s last breath, but that little girl will grow up knowing that her mother’s last act on earth was to do whatever she could to protect her unborn baby,” Spitzer continued. “Driving under the influence has consequences and Yesenia, James, and little Adalyn Rose are proof that those consequences are not just numbers, they are lives that deserved to be lived together not birthdays spent mourning the loss of a loving mother.”

Some of the counts that Pandolfi pleaded guilty to were in connection to a November 2019 arrest for driving while under the influence of a combination of drugs, including meth and morphine.

Even before that guilty plea, she’d been convicted of driving under the influence of drugs three times prior in 2008, 2015, and 2016.

Pandolfi was warned about the Watson advisement all three times, prosecutors said, which California requires for those convicted of DUI. The advisement warns those convicted that if they ever kill someone while driving under the influence, they can be charged with murder.

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