Brown asked for a 16-year prison sentence. He said that Meister had to have known he struck a person, given the way Meister’s truck would have reacted to the collision. He also said that if Meister looked behind his truck, as he claimed to have done, he would have seen the mangled bicycle left behind by the collision, as other witnesses did.

Katelynn Berel talked tearfully about the impact that the loss of her husband has had on her life, and on their 2-year-old daughter, and how shortly after her husband’s death, she lost the fetus she was carrying.

She said that after her husband left their home on Aug. 5, she heard the sirens and went to find her husband after he didn’t answer his phone. She was barred from the crash scene by a police officer, not knowing for certain her husband was the victim.

But still, she said, “I knew that was my husband. I knew right then.”

Since then, she said, life has been a nightmare.

“In these last few months I have been stripped of everything that makes me feel like a woman or a human being,” Berel said. “Every day I wonder why my husband, the one contributing to society, was taken away.