A 67-year-old man has been charged with felony vehicular manslaughter for a January crash that killed a man and a dog plus injured seven people, but a judge just released him from jail, and his Tesla may have been at fault.

You might recall a deadly South of Market car crash in January, which happened just outside The Endup, that took the life of one man and his dog, and left seven other people injured. It was actually two crashes. The accused 67-year-old driver Jia Lin Zheng allegedly smashed into three different vehicles on I-280 in a hit-and-run spree, his Tesla then accelerated up to 90 MPH, and he’s accused of then barreling down the Sixth Street exit. Another collision there killed 27-year-old Mikhael Romanenko and his dog, and left Romanenko’s girlfriend Linh Luu hospitalized with serious injuries.

The Tesla driver, Zheng, who lives in Honolulu but has remained here since, was not arrested until this past Sunday, as the investigation took several months.

DA Brooke Jenkins’s office announced Tuesday afternoon that Zheng has formally been charged with felony vehicular manslaughter, reckless driving, and three counts of hit-and-run driving. But Jenkins’s press release does not acknowledge a pretty significant detail here, which the Chronicle does report, which is that the judge released Zheng from jail. He pleaded not guilty on all charges, though was ordered to surrender his driver’s license.

And Zheng may have a legitimate argument that the Tesla malfunctioned, and he did not operate the vehicle so that its speed would accelerate. Zheng is far from being the first Tesla driver to complain of what’s called “sudden unintended acceleration” in those vehicles. Tesla maintains that this primarily happens with older drivers who operate the vehicle mistakenly.  

Regardless, the judge was apparently moved by the fact that Zheng had no previous criminal record, voluntarily stayed in the Bay Area while the investigation played out, and gave himself up to police.

“This was very traumatic as well for Mr Zheng,” his attorney Adam Gasner told the judge, per the Chronicle. “He’s in a lot of emotional pain for having caused this injury, and he voluntarily stopped driving because of it.”

The Chronicle adds that Zheng has five speeding tickets on his record in Hawaii, as well as a couple of other moving violations. Meanwhile, the late Mikhael Romanenko’s family is suing Zheng and his son separately in a wrongful death lawsuit, as the son was the owner of the Tesla, and they say the father should not have been driving such a high-powered car.

Related: Driver Blames Tesla in Deadly January SoMa Crash, 20 Traffic Violations Linked to Same Name [SFist

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