In the wake of a terrible crash a month ago, one woman is facing a pair of felonies while another young woman is stuck in a wheelchair recovering from substantial injuries.

Juliet “Julie” Maisch, 19, was at the home of boyfriend Ian Arestad just before 4 a.m. Sept. 19 when she walked outside, got into her Honda Accord EX station wagon and left.

She only made it half a block.

“I heard a terrific boom, and I pretty much knew what the sound was. I just couldn’t understand how it could’ve happened because [Maisch] wasn’t going that fast,” Arestad said.

The sound of the crash at Ninth Avenue West and Sixth Street in Kalispell also woke neighbor Amy Elletson out of a dead sleep. She immediately jumped out of bed and ran outside.

Both Arestad and Elletson said they were greeted by the same sight — 25-year-old Sara Joann Smith standing outside Maisch’s smashed station wagon, looking in through the window while her own Jeep Cherokee sat embedded in Elletson’s chain-link fence.

“The girl obviously ran a stop sign, was going way too fast and didn’t try to stop. I never heard any brakes and there were no skid marks,” Arestad said.

Elletson, thinking Smith was trying to check on and help Maisch, went back inside to grab her phone and call 911.

But Smith got back into her own vehicle, Arestad said.

“I tried to hold the door open, but she was throwing punches,” said Arestad, who also claimed Smith was belligerent, reeked of alcohol and was obviously drunk.

He got behind the Jeep to write down the license plate number just as Elletson came back outside, now on the phone with dispatch.

“Sara got back in her vehicle, started it up and hit the gas,” Elletson said. “Then she put it in reverse and skidded backward, driving into a vehicle on the other side of the street.”

Smith also allegedly came close to running down Arestad and Elletson.

“She barreled forward — with no headlights, the front end was totaled, how the vehicle even started I don’t know — and came right at me. I had to jump out of the way, she almost hit me,” Elletson said.

According to Elletson, Smith sped off despite the fact that she was dragging the undercarriage of her vehicle.

Elletson also said a Kalispell police officer later told her Smith only made it four blocks before another officer saw her and turned around to stop her, at which point Smith bailed from the Jeep and lost police in a foot chase.

One piece of key evidence was left behind at the crash scene — the front bumper of Smith’s Jeep, complete with her license plate.

BACK AT THE SCENE of the crash, Arestad had given up figuring out who Smith was so he could check on the badly injured Maisch.

“I looked in the window and Julie was just slumped over in the passenger seat, blood on her face,” he said. “She looked pretty much dead.”

The force of the crash and the fact Maisch was not wearing a seat belt pushed her into the passenger seat when the driver’s side of her station wagon caved in. Arestad opened the passenger door to get a closer look at her, and was relieved to discover she was still alive when he heard her snore-like breathing.

By that point, Elletson had handed the phone off to her daughter and ran to help.

“She was really bad, I don’t know how she did not go through that windshield,” Elletson said. “There was blood everywhere, she was not coherent and she could barely breathe. I told Ian to get on her back side and hold her back as straight as possible while I held her neck, and we kept her as still as possible.”

Elletson and Maisch say not wearing a seat belt may have saved her life.

“That whole side of the car was gone,” Elletson said. “I couldn’t imagine being strapped into that driver’s side because there was nothing left of it.”

Elletson also obtained a cervical collar from a firefighter and placed it around Maisch’s neck while they waited for an ambulance and a backboard.

Maisch was transported to the emergency room before spending eight days in an intensive care unit and another three days in the hospital before being released.

She sustained a fractured collarbone, a broken rib that punctured one of her lungs, fractures on the front and back of her pelvic bone, a fractured hip socket, a broken ball joint in her hip, injuries to her spleen and to a kidney, and two broken teeth.

The damage to Maisch’s teeth was not discovered for a few days after the collision because she couldn’t move or brush her teeth. It turned out two of them broke lengthwise and Maisch must now undergo a pair of surgeries to install screws in her jaw as well as a pair of false teeth.

Smith would resurface at 5 p.m., 11 hours after the collision, when she showed up at the Kalispell Police Department and, according to a court document, admitted she had crashed into another vehicle earlier that day after having consumed alcohol, and that she left the scene of the crash.

THE DOCUMENT did not, however, indicate whether Smith underwent any kind of alcohol testing, and she is not charged with driving under the influence.

Instead Smith faces felony counts of criminal endangerment and failure to remain at the scene of an accident.

“I feel like they could have ordered a toxicology screen after the fact just to see if her blood alcohol level was elevated,” Arestad said. “She just sat in her house ’til she sobered up.”

Smith pleaded not guilty Thursday in Flathead District Court. If convicted, she faces between one year and 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000.

After being released on her own recognizance with the requirement that she participate in remote alcohol monitoring, Smith must now only wait for her hearings, with the one slated for Feb. 12, 2014.

For Maisch, the waiting is much more painful.

She appeared alongside her stepmother and Elletson at Smith’s arraignment, sitting in the aisle of the courtroom in her wheelchair.

“I don’t remember the car coming or anything, and I don’t remember anything up until the ICU, really,” Maisch said Thursday afternoon. “I just woke up in the ICU and I just slept all the time for five days straight. I couldn’t eat. I couldn’t move.”

When she was able to move, although minimally, Maisch found it was particularly painful when she had to have a chest tube removed that had been inserted to correct her collapsed lung.

She said that when she was awake and coherent at the hospital, she wasn’t scared, just happy she wasn’t paralyzed.

“I was just really, really happy I was alive, so that made it not that scary,” she said.

But while it may not be scary, it has certainly put a kink in her normal activities — Maisch enjoys playing hockey, snowboarding, hiking and working out, and she mows lawns for a living.

All of that is on hold while she recovers.

“I’m still in a lot of pain, I still have really bad whiplash,” she said. “I just saw an X-ray of my collarbone and it’s not even close to being healed.”

Despite her pains and the road to recovery ahead, Maisch hopes for something to come out of what happened.

“I hope that (Smith) gets punished so she doesn’t do this to anybody else or kill somebody — because she could have easily killed me,” Maisch said. “I hope she learns her lesson.”

She also had one more hope.

“I hope my recovery comes fast because I already bought a ski pass,” she said.

Reporter Jesse Davis may be reached at 758-4441 or by email at jdavis@dailyinterlake.com.