Charges laid out against Forestville woman in DUI death

Forestville resident Judy Shafer was arraigned in court Tuesday on eight felony counts involving a fatal drunken driving crash that killed a Rohnert Park woman and severely injured the woman's teenage daughter.

Shafer, 55, smashed into the car driven by Kathy O'Daniel, who had picked up her youngest daughter from volleyball practice at Analy High School in Sebastopol on Sept. 14 and was headed home on backroads to Rohnert Park, according to the CHP.

While the CHP wouldn't reveal Shafer's blood alcohol level in court, Sgt. Robert Mota said it was more than double the legal limit of .08.

O'Daniel, 54, the mother of five, died in the Llano Road crash.

Freshman student Kelcee O'Daniel, 15, was hospitalized for several days and just recently returned to classes at Analy. She has a hand cast and suffered a lacerated spleen, said her father, Chuck O'Daniel.

He attended Tuesday's hearing and got his first look at the woman accused of killing his wife and hurting his daughter.

“It's still kind of numbing. We had not seen this woman before. It was interesting at best,” he said.

Shafer, who suffered moderate injuries, was released from the hospital Monday and taken to Sonoma County Jail, said Mota.

She's being held in lieu of $100,000 bail on the eight charges, including gross vehicular manslaughter involving drunken driving and causing a death.

On the afternoon of the accident about 5 p.m., Shafer was driving from her storage unit in southwest Santa Rosa toward home in the west county. As the two vehicles approached each other, Shafer's Jeep drove onto the wrong side of the road and hit the left front side of O'Daniel's Honda Civic, Mota said.

Shafer is due back in court Monday Oct. 5to enter a plea and for a hearing regarding her bail. Shafer, who previously had lived in Orange County, moved to Sonoma County several years ago.

On Saturday, about 450 people attended a memorial service for O'Daniel. Chuck O'Daniel described his wife of 27 years as a deeply religious woman, an active member of The Rock Calvary Chapel in Santa Rosa, and a dedicated mother and wife.

“She was such a master at multi-tasking, she was so organized. She was the field general of our home,” he said.

At the service, she also was remembered for her cooking theme of “never the same way twice” and for being “time challenged,” he said.

“We started the memorial service eight minutes late in her honor,” he said.

In addition to her daughter Kelcee, she is survived by daughters Kacee and Erin, and sons, Timothy and Michael, as well as grandson Michael.

The family moved to Rohnert Park in 2006 from Washington when he took a job as vice president of advertising at the Marin Independent Journal. He also worked in advertising at The Press Democrat.

Kathy O'Daniel had worked in recent years at Creekside Middle School in Rohnert Park. With cutbacks in that district, she started this fall at Brooks Elementary in Windsor.