VAN BUREN -- A Van Buren man pleaded innocent Wednesday in Crawford County Circuit Court to a manslaughter charge in an August 2014 fatal car crash.
Jeremy House, 34, was ordered held in lieu of $25,000 bond during his arraignment before Circuit Judge Gary Cottrell. Cottrell appointed the public defender to represent House, who was still in jail Wednesday afternoon.
In addition to the manslaughter charge, Prosecuting Attorney Marc McCune charged House with leaving the scene of an accident involving injury or death and with being a habitual criminal, having been convicted of four or more felonies.
House was arrested on Tuesday. McCune said testing of evidence at the state Crime Laboratory caused the nearly year-long delay in charges being filed in the case.
House was charged in the Aug. 28, 2014, death of Brian Sizemore, 33, of Alma, whose body was found next to his wrecked Jeep off Barcelona Road near Uniontown.
A report by the Crawford County sheriff's office said the Jeep went off the road and flipped, ejecting Sizemore.
Reports say Sizemore was killed around 1 a.m. Aug. 28, 2014, but a passer-by who did not discover the body reported the accident to the sheriff after 6 a.m.
Deputies contacted House after finding his cell phone in the wreckage of the Jeep.
House said he was not in the Jeep at the time of the wreck. He said Sizemore wanted to go to Fort Smith, but House wanted to go home and walked to a nearby residence, where he got a ride home.
Witnesses noted that House had scratches and cuts on him. He gave conflicting stories to different people about how he got the injuries.
But McCune said a bloody palm print was found in fabric in the ceiling over the driver's side of the Jeep. Testing at the Crime Lab showed that House's DNA matched that extracted from the bloody palm print, he said.
Witnesses and House told deputies that House and Sizemore had been drinking all day and had been driving around on the back roads of Crawford County.
Stephanie Howell lives on Barcelona Road and told deputies that the two men visited her home briefly about 9 p.m. the night of the accident. She also told the deputies that she received a call from a neighbor earlier that evening who told her she had seen men in a dark-colored Jeep "'flying up and down the road, hanging out the sunroof acting crazy.'"
Metro on 08/20/2015