A man who drove drunk and fatally struck a pedestrian in University Heights, then fled and tried to cover up his involvement in the collision, was convicted of murder and other charges.
Brandon Allen Janik, 38, ran a red light and struck 47-year-old Joshua Gilliland on June 10, 2023, as the victim was crossing El Cajon Boulevard at the three-way intersection of Normal Street and El Cajon and Park boulevards.
Paramedics took Gilliland to a hospital, where he died four days later. Friends of Gilliland, who was a bartender at Cheers on Adams Avenue, said he was walking to work when he was struck.
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In the days after hitting Gilliland, prosecutors say Janik had the smashed windshield on his vehicle replaced and claimed to his insurance company that the car was damaged when he backed the vehicle into a pole while parking it at his apartment.
Janik was arrested for the fatal crash about three months later.
Along with murder, a San Diego jury found Janik guilty late Thursday afternoon of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated, hit-and-run, and several other charges related to filing a false insurance claim.
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Deputy District Attorney Hailey Williams told jurors that after drinking at bars in Hillcrest throughout the day, Janik was later found by bystanders passed out behind the wheel of a car stopped in the middle of University Avenue.
After Janik was pulled out of the vehicle, he told the bystanders attending to him, "Thank you. You have no idea how much you are helping me. I already have a DUI," according to Williams.
That prior DUI stemmed from a 2016 crash in which Janik was behind the wheel of a car that veered off state Route 52 and rolled over multiple times, causing him serious injuries.
Prosecutors charged Janik with murder based on that prior DUI conviction.
Due to a high volume of emergency calls that night, police were unable to respond to the multiple 911 callers who reported the stopped car on University Avenue, prosecutors said, but paramedics did respond and assess Janik.
Williams said Janik assured the paramedics he would call an Uber or walk home, then waited until they left, drove off, and struck Gilliland a few minutes later.
The prosecutor said Janik fled the scene because he was aware he faced a murder charge for causing a DUI-related fatality. She described the ensuing attempts to repair the vehicle and make false claims to his insurance company as "a callous, deceitful, full-blown cover-up campaign."
Janik's defense attorney, Justin Murphy, did not deny that Janik struck Gilliland, nor that he had a responsibility to stop after the crash.
Instead, Murphy argued there was no evidence to prove Janik was intoxicated at the time he struck Gilliland and thus he was not guilty of murder or any of the DUI-related charges.
"Up until his horrible decision to flee, no crime had been committed," said Murphy, who explained that in the moment, his client "panicked, freaked out and made a cowardly decision"
Murphy argued that without any physical evidence of intoxication — such as blood or breath tests — the prosecution was relying on the observations of laypeople who made assumptions that Janik was drunk.
The attorney said the paramedics who encountered Janik were the only witnesses who were professionally trained to recognize the signs of intoxication and they did not notice any scent of alcohol on Janik, nor did they notice any bloodshot eyes, slurred speech or an unsteady gait.
The prosecution's case included Janik's credit card purchases for alcoholic drinks at several nearby bars, but Murphy said no one could speak to how much of those drinks — if any — Janik consumed.
While Murphy did not argue Janik's behavior was the result of a medical condition, in his opening statement he described Janik as a single father working three jobs who was "very exhausted that day."
Williams countered that the totality of the evidence proved Janik was intoxicated, from his credit card activity to his flight to his behavior on University Avenue, in which the first thing he mentioned to bystanders was his prior DUI and his discussions with the paramedics about walking home or taking a rideshare vehicle.
