Stanislaus County pays $7.1 million for deputy’s fatal high-speed collision
Stanislaus County will pay $7.1 million to the family and girlfriend of a man killed when a sheriff’s deputy slammed into his car at over 100 mph, attorneys representing the family announced. The case was settled in November, a few weeks before it was set to go to trial.
The county settled the case just a month before it settled a separate case involving the Sheriff’s Office for $5 million. Both cases allowed Stanislaus County to deny any wrongdoing or liability and were settled before they were set to go to trial. Neither had the involved deputies face criminal charges.
High speed, fog and a stop sign
Deputy Eric Fulmer was driving at about 121 mph on River Road in a rural area southeast of Crows Landing in western Stanislaus County on a foggy January 2022 morning when he collided with a red Chevrolet Camaro driven by 21-year-old Saul Bettancourt. His girlfriend, Maria Prado, also was in the Camaro.
Betancourt was killed instantly by the broadside collision. Prado and Fulmer were seriously injured. A California Highway Patrol investigation, which took almost a year to complete, found Fulmer primarily at fault. He was fired by the Sheriff’s Office in March 2023.
Fulmer never faced any criminal charges. Around the time he was fired, Stanislaus County District Attorney Jeff Laugero decided not to press any charges against him. The decision caused protests.
“We aren’t confident that we could ever prove what those conditions were at the time of the collision,” Laugero said in a 2023 interview with The Modesto Bee.
The conditions when the crash occurred
Fulmer was responding to a call for help by a Newman police officer who was in a physical fight with a suspect. The deputy was driving an unmarked, department-issued Nissan Maxima equipped with lights and sirens.
Betancourt had just picked up Prado from her graveyard shift at a nursing home in Newman. He slowed down as he approached a stop sign at Villa Manucha’s intersection with River Road. Betancourt rolled the stop sign at 6 mph, a fact used by county’s defense during court proceedings.
However, a CHP investigation found that Fulmer’s excessive speed caused the collision, as did early-morning fog. Fulmer was “approximately 392 feet away” and “most likely not visible to Betancourt” when the Camaro entered the intersection during twilight conditions shortly after 7 a.m., CHP investigators determined.
Laugero called CHP’s determination, based on survey measurements and video of the scene taken 19 minutes after the collision, “speculative at best,” because it was partly contradicted by Fulmer’s estimate of about 1,000 feet.
Anthony Silva excessive-force case
The county’s settlement with Betancourt’s family came a month before it settled with Anthony Silva’s mother for $5 million.
Silva, 40, died after spending nearly a year paralyzed after a 2022 encounter with Sheriff’s Office deputies. Silva was homeless at the time.
He was detained at the Riverbank Community Center during Riverbank’s Cheese and Wine Festival by deputies responding to a “disturbance.” While handcuffed, he was “forcibly slammed” onto concrete as he was being searched. The entire encounter was recorded on the deputies’ body cameras.
None of the deputies that used force on Silva faced criminal charges.
The Sheriff’s Office did not respond to a request for comment by this story’s deadline.
This story was originally published May 28, 2026 at 2:54 PM.
