San Diego

A 20-year-old Linda Vista man was sentenced Tuesday to one year in jail for killing a minister’s daughter while he was driving drunk.

A courtroom full of members of the Restoration Temple in San Diego watched as San Diego Superior Court Judge J. Richard Haden also placed Leon Steven Coyle on five years’ probation and fined him $1,000.

The victim’s father, Graham Truscott, pastor of Restoration Temple, had asked Haden to sentence Coyle to the maximum term, which was eight years in state prison.

Coyle had just returned from a three-month study at Chino State Prison, where officials determined that Coyle was not a danger to the community if his problem with alcohol was under control.

Coyle pleaded guilty Jan. 22 to vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence in the May 2, 1985, death of Deborah Truscott, 24, who died 17 days after Coyle’s truck collided with hers in Linda Vista.

Coyle agreed to waive his three months in prison as credit for time served, and Haden ordered him to abstain from alcohol and to sell his truck to get money to pay restitution to the victim’s family.

Haden ordered a review of Coyle’s case every three months after he is released, warning him that he could still go to prison if he violates his probation.

The minister asked the judge “to send a message to every drunk driver” by imposing a long term.

“It may be said that Mr. Coyle is not jail material. Our daughter was not graveyard material,” Truscott testified.

The minister said that, if Coyle had received an eight-year term, he could be released in four years. “He could come back with a new life at 24. That was the very age our daughter was when he killed her,” he said.

Afterward, Truscott broke down and cried in the courtroom and told reporters he was disappointed with the sentence.