Angelo Michael Antolino, a 31-year-old resident of Commerce Avenue in Deltona, a state prison inmate, was booked at the Flagler County jail on Friday on charges of vehicular homicide and DUI manslaughter as a result of a 2020 crash on U.S. 1 that took the life of 59-year-old Indiana Kern and gravely injured William M. Kerns, 62.
The warrant for his arrest was issued in May but not served until Friday at the jail. He was due to be arraigned in July, when it turned out that he was already in state prison, after getting sentenced on a charge of battery on an elderly person. He was at the Apalachee Correctional Institute. Circuit Judge Terence Perkins on Sept. 1 ordered him transported to Flagler to face the charges. Antolino was arraigned before Perkins this morning.
The crash on U.S. 1 near Plantation Bay looked horrific: a charred vehicle smashed against a utility pole, another vehicle demolished beyond recognition. The consequences were worse than it looked. Indiana Kerns had been killed. William Kerns had a fractured jaw, a fractured shoulder, broken ribs, and a broken leg, and was taken to a hospital in Daytona Beach.
Angelo Michael Antolino, 29 at the time, had been driving a 2004 Chevrolet Trail Blazer. He was going north on U.S. 1. The Kerns were driving a Honda Accord south. Antolino was high on drugs: his toxicology report showed he was high on methamphetamines, a level of impairment a toxicologist deemed “extremely high [that] would have impaired his normal faculties,” according to his arrest report. He was also on Midazolam, a sedative. And he was traveling at 111 miles per hour, based on a Florida Highway Patrol reconstruction of the crash. He lost control of the Trail Blazer, crossed the median, and crashed head-on into the Kerns’s car.Antolino’s own car caught fire and was ablaze when a passerby pulled him out of the flames. He is facing two second-degree felonies (vehicular homicide and DUI manslaughter causing the death of a human) and two third-degree felonies (DUI with serious bodily injury and reckless driving causing serious bodily injury). The combined charges add up to a maximum of 60 years in prison, though it isn’t likely at all that the ultimate sentence would approach that steep a punishment, especially if he pleads to charges. But his past felonies and prison time will count against him, running up his sentencing points and making him a repeat offender.
The incident that led to his current imprisonment took place a year ago in Deltona. Antolino had gone to see his mother, though he wasn’t allowed to. His mother allowed him in. His grandfather was upset. The two men argued. When his mother tried to separate them, they started pushing each other, until Antolino pushed his father powerfully enough that his wife had to catch him to keep him from falling over: Antolino’s father is 78, has one leg and a prosthetic leg.
Antolino told law enforcement that it was his father who’d struck him with a fist first (there was evidence of a strike on the left side of his face), and that it was Antolino who called 911. Officers determined Antolino had been the primary aggressor, charged him with battery on a person 65 or older, a felony, and booked him at the Volusia jail. He pleaded and was sentenced on March 17 to a year and a day in prison, that extra day signifying the difference between serving the time in a county jail as opposed to a state prison. It wasn’t his first time there: he’d served time twice for grand theft.
