SPRINGFIELD — Lauren Wegner’s parents wrapped their arms around each other in the front row of a Sangamon County courtroom as they braced to learn whether the man who killed their daughter in a 2022 wrong-way crash would be held accountable for her death.
They weren’t alone. Around their necks, Bill and Evelyn Wegner each wore Lauren’s ashes. Evelyn raised her necklace to her lips. She gave it a kiss. Then she listened as a jury returned its verdict Wednesday.
That jury found Shane Jason Woods, a man once convicted for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021 U.S. Capitol riot, guilty of reckless homicide for driving his GMC Sierra the wrong way onto Interstate 55 near Lake Springfield on Nov. 8, 2022, killing Lauren Wegner of Skokie.
But the jury rejected a more serious charge of first-degree murder, as Woods’ defense attorneys had urged them to do.
The verdict followed less than an hour of deliberations.
Woods, 47, testified Wednesday that he drove into oncoming highway traffic in a failed attempt to take his own life, for fear of the federal prison sentence that loomed over his head for assaulting people at the Capitol.
He told the jury he believed “millions and millions of people” hated him.
Now, President Donald Trump has delivered a sweeping pardon to nearly everyone convicted for their role in the Capitol riot. But Woods again faces serious prison time, though not nearly as much as if he’d been convicted of first-degree murder.
The panel also found Woods guilty of two counts of aggravated driving under the influence — causing injury and death — as well as aggravated fleeing and eluding. The most serious conviction carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.
Sangamon County Judge Ryan Cadagin set Woods’ sentencing for Aug. 19.
After court, Bill and Evelyn Wegner told the Chicago Sun-Times they expect Woods to be sentenced to between four and 13 years in prison.
They also said they’re relieved that Woods’ trial is finally over.
“We’re not totally happy with the verdict,” Bill Wegner said. “But we can’t really argue with the verdict.”
Woods’ defense attorneys, Mark Wykoff and Daniel Fultz, declined to comment.
Still, quiet applause could be heard from Woods’ side of the courtroom after the verdict was read.
‘Rather … Dead Than Alive’
More than 50 people from Illinois once faced charges in connection with the Capitol riot. But no case in the state ever turned as tragic.
Jurors who heard the case in Springfield listened to 22 witnesses over two days. Through dashcam video and courtroom testimony, members of the panel witnessed a traffic stop that preceded the crash, they saw Woods’ truck descend north into the southbound lanes of I-55, and they saw the fiery collision and the smoke and debris left behind on the highway.
They heard from a Granite City couple also injured in the crash. And they saw images of the Mercury Sable, crushed and crumpled by Woods’ pickup truck, that contained the body of Lauren Wegner, 35.
An Illinois State Police official told them she later had to be identified by her fingernail polish.
Wykoff told the jury Wednesday that Woods was “the only person in the universe that knows what his state of mind was, and what his intentions were, that evening.” Moments later, Woods took the witness stand in his own defense.
Woods told the jury that he’d once been happily married, but his marriage began to break down around 2019 or 2020. Around that time, he said he also began to pay more attention to politics.
Fultz asked whether he’d become an “ardent supporter of President Trump?”
“I would say an ardent supporter of Americans,” Woods testified.
Woods told the jury about his experience at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, where he assaulted a U.S. Capitol police officer and a cameraman. He said his June 2021 arrest that followed in Springfield triggered “instant, instant, instant depression.”
“I was national news,” Woods said, adding that “millions and millions of people hated me.”
Ultimately, Woods said he concluded that he “would have rather been dead than alive.” He said he first tried to end his life with a gun in April 2022. He told the jury that he called a friend who managed to get the gun out of his hand before he pulled the trigger.
Woods pleaded guilty to his role in the Capitol riot five months later, in September 2022.
Then, a month before the crash that killed Lauren Wegner, Woods said he tried to hang himself. He said his girlfriend cut the rope.
‘It takes a big f—ing man’
Finally, on Nov. 8, 2022, Woods said he got into a fight with his girlfriend. He couldn’t remember why.
But that night, then-Divernon Police Officer Patrick Hurley spotted Woods’ truck barreling northbound up I-55. Hurley, who happened to be related to Woods’ girlfriend, pulled Woods over at exit 88 around Springfield’s southern border.
That’s where Woods allegedly told Hurley, “it takes a big f—ing man to say what I’m about to say: I’m gonna kill myself.”
Hurley thought he had the situation under control. But eventually, Woods peeled away and drove his truck west before ultimately turning north into a southbound off-ramp from I-55.
Woods testified that he “didn’t know exactly” what he was doing, but he understood he was driving the wrong way onto a highway off-ramp.
Crucially, Woods said he was trying to hit a semi-tractor trailer. He told the jury, “big truck beats little truck.”
“I figured I would die and he would be fine,” Woods testified.
Woods said the whole experience lasted less than five seconds. Rather than hitting a semi, though, he testified that “a little car was in front of me, and I tried to steer out of the way, but we both turned in the same direction.”
Lauren Wegner, he testified, was “innocent.”
But Special Prosecutor Derek Dion told the jury in his closing argument that Woods drove his truck into the fast lane — where “he gunned it” and made a choice to do something “inherently deadly.”
Lauren Wegner “died because of the defendant’s choice,” the prosecutor said.
“And he should be held accountable.”