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Inset: Brandie Gotch (Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office). Screenshot: Tire tracks left in the Peoria, Arizona, park where she ran over a teenage girl (KSAZ).
An Arizona mother who ran over a 12-year-old girl with her pickup truck after a quarrel in a park was sentenced Friday to a decade behind bars, prosecutors say.
Brandie Gotch, 31, pleaded guilty to three counts of aggravated assault, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office said in a press release. In February 2024, Gotch’s children were fighting at Westgreen Park in Peoria, a suburb of Phoenix, while other kids were egging them on and recording the incident.
Prosecutors said Gotch arrived at the park to pick her kids up and was walking them back to her truck when a 14-year-old boy called her a name. Gotch walked up to the boy, grabbed him by the hair and began “pulling his head back and forth and side to side, while yelling at him,” police previously said.
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When a second boy called her a “b—” she then reportedly went to her white Chevy Silverado, grabbed what appeared to be a sharp stick, and chased after the boy with it while yelling, “I am going to kill you and run you over.”
Gotch corralled her four kids in the pickup truck. The second boy stood behind her truck “dancing and mocking her” before moving away and standing by his sister. At this point, Gotch revved the engine and drove right at the boy and his sister. The boy was able to jump out of the way but Gotch ran over the 12-year-old girl’s leg, prosecutors said.
The angry mom proceeded to drive through the park where more than a dozen children were located. Some of them had to leap out of the truck’s path, according to prosecutors.
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Gotch drove home but was later arrested.
In an interview with detectives, Gotch admitted to driving into the park, going “around the bathrooms” and “through the park field” before driving away. When asked if she ran over any of the kids, she said she did not think she did and stated, “I hope not.”
Per the affidavit, Gotch told police that the children from the park had been bullying her kids at school. She claimed that she had reported the kids to school officials and the police, but said “nothing has been done.” She further believed that the bullying was continuing at the park.
Though Gotch assured authorities that she made sure all of her children were wearing their seat belts when she drove through the park, the claim was undercut by the kids, who told police they were not restrained and had been “bouncing all over the vehicle” during the incident.
“This could have been a much more tragic situation; thankfully the worst injury in this was a sprained ankle and some bad scrapes and bruises,” said Maricopa County Attorney Rachel Mitchell. “Even when angry or frustrated, it’s up to adults to act like adults. It is never okay to take to take our rage out on a kid.”
