Ethan Couch
American convicted of manslaughter
Ethan Anthony Couch (born April 11, 1997) is an American convicted criminal who killed four people at the age of 16 while driving under the influence on June 15, 2013, in Burleson, Texas. Couch, while intoxicated and under the influence of drugs, was driving on a restricted license and speeding in a residential area when he lost control of his vehicle, which slammed into a group of people assisting another driver with a disabled car. The collision killed four people and injured nine others. Two passengers in Couch's pickup truck were critically injured, one of whom was completely paralyzed.
Couch was indicted on four counts of intoxication manslaughter for recklessly driving under the influence. In December 2013, Judge Jean Hudson Boyd sentenced Couch to ten years of probation, subsequently ordering him to undergo therapy at a long term inpatient facility. Before sentencing, Couch's attorneys had argued that Couch had "affluenza" and needed rehabilitation instead of prison, arguing that Couch had no understanding of boundaries as his affluent parents had never given him any. Couch's sentence, judged by many as outrageously lenient, set off what The New York Times called "an emotional, angry debate that has stretched far beyond the North Texas suburbs".
On December 11, 2015, after a video was posted online purporting to show Couch drinking at a party, he became the subject of a manhunt, and was listed in the National Fugitive Database after attempts by his probation officer to contact him failed. On December 28, 2015, authorities detained Couch and his mother in the Mexican resort city of Puerto Vallarta, Jalisco.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ethan Couch” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.