{"id":28250,"date":"2019-08-04T10:38:44","date_gmt":"2019-08-04T16:38:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.summitdaily.com\/?p=369489"},"modified":"2019-08-04T10:38:44","modified_gmt":"2019-08-04T16:38:44","slug":"jury-woman-found-in-vail-dumpster-not-guilty-on-all-counts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/local-news\/jury-woman-found-in-vail-dumpster-not-guilty-on-all-counts\/","title":{"rendered":"Jury: Woman found in Vail dumpster not guilty on all counts"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
A jury of eight women and four men acquitted Linnea Hayda on all four counts she faced after deliberating for 10 hours.<\/strong>
The Vail Daily<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

EAGLE \u2014 A jury of eight women and four men acquitted Linnea Hayda on all four counts she faced after deliberating for 10 hours, returning the unanimous verdict around 9 p.m. Friday.<\/p>\n

Hayda, 33, faced four criminal charges stemming from a March 27, 2018, incident in which she was found in a Vail dumpster 200 yards from the apartment she once shared with her ex-husband. She says her ex-husband abducted her, zip-tied her and threw her in there.<\/p>\n

Vail police and prosecutors said nothing of the sort happened. They said Hayda put herself in the dumpster and then lied to police to try to implicate her ex-husband and bolster her position in the custody battle over their two children.<\/p>\n

Her ex-husband was not charged, and prosecutors said during the eight days of testimony that the Vail police investigation exonerated him by accounting for his whereabouts during the incident.<\/p>\n

Impassioned pleas<\/h3>\n

The case went to the jury Friday morning following impassioned closing arguments from both the prosecution and defense.<\/p>\n

\u201cThink about a couple things. Who has a dog in this fight? Who has a motive in this case? All the statements from Ms. Hayda point to one motive, to go after her ex-husband. There\u2019s retribution,\u201d assistant district attorney Heidi McCollum said Friday morning.<\/p>\n

The defense\u2019s arguments are all excuses that point to someone else, McCollum said. \u201cIt\u2019s everyone else\u2019s fault,\u201d McCollum said.<\/p>\n

McCollum said Hayda started blaming her ex-husband from her hospital bed moments after Vail firefighters pulled her out of the dumpster and paramedics rushed her to the hospital.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe said her ex-husband did this, even before she spoke with the police. She said in text messages that her ex-husband put a bag over her head and tried to suffocate her, that she finally tore holes in that bag so she could breathe, then put it back on because she was cold,\u201d McCollum said.<\/p>\n

He didn\u2019t do that or anything like it, McCollum told the jury.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll she wanted to do was get (her ex-husband),\u201d McCollum said.<\/p>\n

Hayda and her ex-husband were in a bitter custody battle over their two children.<\/p>\n

Hayda told police she was abducted in an Avon parking lot as she walked to her car on the afternoon of March 26, 2018, when it was still light out. McCollum said that means Hayda\u2019s ex-husband would have had to try to kill her and dump her body in the dumpster \u2014 all before he picked up his children from daycare, McCollum said.<\/p>\n

As part of her guilty plea for previous domestic violence charges, Hayda was under a restraining order that barred her from retaliating against her ex-husband, McCollum said.<\/p>\n

\u201cHer entire motive was to retaliate against him,\u201d McCollum said.<\/p>\n

Defense attorney Thea Reiff argued that Vail police were careless in their investigation, that they did not prove Hayda\u2019s ex-husband did not do this, and that exonerating him was based only on his word. Reiff also argued Hayda\u2019s ex-husband might have used drugs to cause Hayda\u2019s purported memory loss, adding that Hayda\u2019s ex-husband had the most to gain if Hayda wound up in real trouble.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s saying \u2018I\u2019m done with you, you\u2019re trash, and no one is going to believe you when you talk about it,\u2019\u201d Reiff said.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou know the biases that came into this case as soon as the woman in the dumpster was identified,\u201d Reiff said.<\/p>\n

Vail police spent hundreds of hours investigating the case and did a solid job, McCollum countered.<\/p>\n

\u201cThank goodness they did their job and checked out her story,\u201d McCollum said.<\/p>\n

Deputy district attorney Johnny Lombardi asked the jury to let common sense rule their deliberations about Hayda. Her ex-husband was not on trial, Lombardi said, but Hayda was.<\/p>\n

via:: Summit Daily<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A jury of eight women and four men acquitted Linnea Hayda on all four counts she faced after deliberating for 10 hours.The Vail Daily EAGLE \u2014 A jury of eight women and four men acquitted Linnea Hayda on all four counts she faced after deliberating for 10 hours, returning the unanimous verdict around 9 p.m. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[97],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-28250","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-21 21:23:13","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KIFT - The LIFT FM","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28250\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kift\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}