KDSN Radio

10 year sentence for man convicted of fatal wrong-way crash in NW IA

(Radio Iowa) – A 29-year-old man has been sentenced to a decade in prison for a wreck that killed a northwest Iowa woman last year. A jury found Jorge Ardany Ortega-Ortega, formerly of Cherokee, guilty of homicide by vehicle for an accident that happened during a blizzard.

Dash camera footage showed he drifted across the center line of a two-lane highway and stayed in the wrong lane for about a mile before his car hit another vehicle head-on. The other driver, 65-year-old Rose Bumstead of Nemaha, was taken to a hospital in Storm Lake, where she died.

As part of his sentence, Orega-Ortega has been ordered to pay 165-thousand dollars in restitution to Bumstead’s estate.