UPDATED: The upcoming trial of a truck driver charged with killing six people on Interstate 75 was postponed Friday after public defenders discovered a last-minute piece of evidence that could benefit their client.
Benjamin Brewer, 41, was scheduled to stand trial Monday in Hamilton County Criminal Court for crashing into stopped traffic on I-75 on June 25, 2015. He gave blood samples that night, which the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation tested on July 16, 2015, court records show.
The results were positive for methamphetamine in Brewer’s blood, prosecutors say.
But public defenders didn’t know until Wednesday the TBI had sent the sample to an Oklahoma facility that tests blood for the federal government, according to a motion filed Friday.
That’s important because the second test contained “half of the amounts [of meth] reported by the TBI,” the motion says. But the state had never provided results of the second test, which it was required to do, Deputy Public Defender Mike Little wrote.