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Daughter Of LAPD Sergeant Gets 2 Years In Prison For Hit-And-Run Death Of Bicyclist

TORRANCE (CBSLA.com) — The daughter of a Los Angeles Police Department sergeant was sentenced Thursday to two years in prison in the crash that killed a bicyclist in Gardena last year.

Vanessa Marie Yanez, 24, pleaded no contest on Aug. 6 to one felony count each of leaving the scene of an accident and perjury, along with one misdemeanor count of vehicular manslaughter.

Yanez was driving east on El Segundo Boulevard when her car hit 60year-old bicyclist Jesse Dotson Jr. on June 26, 2013. Dotson died three days later.

During the sentencing hearing, some Dotson's relatives lashed out at Yanez.

"You left my brother for dead," Dotson's sister, Annette Dotson Woodard, said. "All along, you knew you hit a human being."

Yanez, the daughter of veteran LAPD Sgt. Arturo Yanez, went to the Huntington Park Police Department about 1:50 a.m. the day after the crash and filed a stolen car report.

"She reported it stolen and said it was found parked down the street and had suffered some kind of traffic collision damage," Gardena police Lt. Steve Prendergast said shortly after Yanez's arrest.

The next day, when media reports about the accident started to appear, the Huntington Park police officer who took the report realized the connection and called Gardena police to tip them off, Prendergast said.

(©2014 CBS Local Media, a division of CBS Radio Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Wire services contributed to this report.)

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