King Vanga killed Pam and Joe Juarez in a 2021 car crash when he was a student at Stanford. He is now suing his victims’ family members for defamation after they emailed the university to make sure administrators knew what he had done. Vanga claims they defamed him by mentioning the DUI he was charged with, as well as using the term “murdered” when he was actually charged with vehicular manslaughter, TechDirt reports.
To be clear, he doesn’t deny that he killed the Juarezes. He drove into the back of their car at a high speed, causing their car to spin out, crash and catch on fire. The couple died at the scene. Vanga was arrested and charged with driving under the influence and vehicular manslaughter.
Now, it’s entirely possible that Vanga wasn’t under the influence because despite officers claiming they smelled alcohol on his breath, a later blood test that the California Department of Justice analyzed found no alcohol. Still, at the time that the family emailed Stanford, the DUI charge was still in the police report and had been reported by news outlets, so they had no way of knowing that the guy who killed their family members denied being under the influence.
It’s also possible that the family could have been more accurate in their emails to the university and stopped short of calling it murder. At the same time, though, two people are dead, and Vanga killed them. It takes some serious audacity to actually file a defamation lawsuit against the grieving family of the people you killed.
Vanga then went a step further and said he would drop the lawsuit if the Juarez’s daughter-in-law agreed “not to make or publish any disparaging statements about Mr. Vanga in the future” and “not to encourage the criminal prosecution of Mr. Vanga, including by communicating with government officers or protesting at any conference, hearing, or trial involving Mr. Vanga.”
Ironically, because he chose to file such a ridiculous lawsuit, even more people know that Vanga killed two people with his car. A lot more. Had he simply chosen not to sue the family of the couple that he killed, we wouldn’t be writing about it now, and you wouldn’t have ever known that King Vanga killed two people with his car when he was a student at Stanford.
Lawyer Ken “Popehat” White has since taken up the case and has filed an anti-SLAPP motion to get the lawsuit thrown out. We’re not sure how long it will take, but the good news is, California has some of the strongest anti-SLAPP protections in the country, so odds are, it’s only a matter of time before the lawsuit is thrown out. At least we hope.