Did a WA trooper get special treatment after a fatal crash? Look at the video

When four troopers arrived at the scene of a fatal Richland motorcycle crash, they soon discovered one of their own was involved.

Trooper Sarah Clasen, a 13-year member of the Washington State Patrol, was off duty and turning off Highway 240 into her neighborhood when she hit a motorcyclist.

Community members have scrutinized on social media Clasen’s actions at the scene and have speculated whether she received special treatment from fellow WSP officers who responded to the crash on March 1.

Richland police ended up taking over the investigation and eventually arresting her for driving drunk.

But it would be six months before she was charged with vehicular homicide, adding to the online speculation that she is being treated differently.

Clasen, 35, recently pleaded innocent to the charge and remains out of jail without bail and on paid leave from her job pending trial, which is now reset for February 2026.

The Tri-City Herald obtained hours of body camera footage through the Washington Public Records Act, showing what the first troopers said and did when they discovered Clasen was the driver and 20-year-old Jhoser Vega Sanchez was not likely to survive.

For about 30 minutes, it was not clear who would take control of the investigation because the state patrol normally handles collisions on state highways and interstates. Richland police officially took charge of the case about 8:15 p.m.

In most cases, the troopers had minimal contact with Clasen before they ended up being sent to another fatal crash near Benton City. But one WSP sergeant remained on the scene with Clasen until Richland police Detective Steve Heid arrived at 9:15 p.m.

Before Heid arrived, Clasen asked twice if she could go home. Both times Richland police told her she needed to stay.

Initial comments by the WSP troopers indicated officers didn’t suspect Clasen was drunk.

But Heid became suspicious when he noticed a faint smell of alcohol, a slight glossiness to her eyes and a number of spelling errors in her written statement, according to court documents.

When he asked her to take a breath test, she refused. Under state law, that meant she had to be arrested while he applied for a search warrant for a sample of her blood.

Six hours after the crash, her blood was drawn at 1:16 a.m. at Kadlec Regional Medical Center in Richland, and she was booked into the Benton County jail.

Weeks later, police reports obtained by the Herald said the blood tests showed her blood-alcohol level at the hospital was 0.17%, – just over twice the legal limit.

Deadly March motorcycle crash

Clasen worked a morning shift on March 1. After work that afternoon, she met her husband, Trent Clasen, a former WSP trooper, at a Richland bar.

Security video from neighboring businesses show the couple enter the bar at the back of a former Chinese restaurant about 3:20 p.m. and leave at 7:30 p.m.

Police reports show that the couple’s bar tab from that night could not be found at the tavern, but previous bar tabs showed they were frequent customers. Seized bar tabs appeared to show the couple visited three to five times every week in the two months before the deadly crash, according to police.

On March 1, Sarah Clasen was driving separately from her husband after leaving the bar and stopped to pick up a pizza, then headed toward their Horn Rapids subdivision.

She was making a left turn in her SUV from highway at the southern edge of the Hanford site when she collided with Vega Sanchez on his motorcycle in the oncoming lane about 7:40 p.m.

The OnStar system in her Kia Telluride automatically called emergency dispatchers. It was one of seven calls made to 911 about the crash.

She initially told dispatchers she thought everyone was OK, but then she got out of her car and relayed that Sanchez didn’t have a pulse.

Two minutes after she first started talking with dispatchers, she said she was a “first responder” and was going to start CPR.

4 WSP troopers came to scene

Richland medics and police officers arrived and continued trying to revive Vega Sanchez. And WSP Trooper Brenden Kelly arrived at 7:45 p.m.

Kelly, a five-year officer with the agency, approached Clasen standing near her SUV. After finding that she was the driver, he called WSP Sgt. Daniel Munder to let him know.

Another trooper, Matthew Parham, arrived next at 7:55 p.m. He spoke briefly with Clasen and to two witnesses before he was sent to the Benton City crash.

The video footage shows Sgt. Munder arrive at 8:04 p.m.

He spent the most time with Clasen, finding her a coat and a place to sit and coordinating with Richland officers.

The final WSP officer to arrive was Trooper Dylan Thomas. He was there for about 10 minutes before he also headed to the Benton City collision.

WSP body-cam video

7:45 p.m.

After speaking to some witnesses, WPS Trooper Brenden Kelly walks over to Clasen.

“Did you see what happened?” Kelly asked.

“No. I didn’t see a light. I didn’t see anything. Turned left and ...,” Clasen responded.

“Is this your car?” Kelly asked.

“Yeah.”

Kelly then asked her to describe what happened, and she told him she was headed west and the motorcycle was in the opposite lane.

“I literally didn’t see. I was turning and then all of the sudden — boom,” she said. “I started CPR.”

Kelly called Sgt. Munder and suggested Richland police would need to take over the investigation. It’s not clear what Munder told him. That portion of the conversation was not recorded.

8:04 p.m.

Munder arrived at 8:04 p.m., about the same time that Vega Sanchez was taken to Kadlec hospital.

He called an unidentified supervisor and said he might need a WSP crash scene technician to process the collision. At that point, he did not know about the second fatal crash in Benton City.

When he walked up to Sarah Clasen, she was talking on the phone to someone while standing near her SUV.

“You, OK? I mean, I know you’re not. Are you physically good?” Munder asked.

She looked down at the blood on the knees of her jeans, then responded, “Yeah. It’s his blood.”

She told Munder that she saw the motorcyclist near a white reflective sign, and that she thought it was a car with a headlight out.

After their initial conversation, Munder called back his supervisor and another investigator and updated them and said there was “nothing criminal” about the wreck.

“Still trying to get a hold of a tech,” Munder told his supervisor. “Just talked to (Trooper Brian) Mulvaney, he said, ‘Well, if it’s a ... conflict of interest.’ I’m like, ‘Well, there’s nothing really criminal.’”

8:15 p.m.

Munder told a Richland police sergeant at the scene that the WSP could help with the investigation, but the Richland officer said they could handle it.

“We can do everything,” Munder suggested. “It just depends on what we’re thinking about here. Of course, she is a trooper. She’s actually in our crew.”

“We have the detectives coming. We can do everything, but maybe not just the whole thing. We can do everything, but maybe just for impartial reasons,” Munder said. “I don’t know if your bosses would go with that.”

The Richland sergeant, whose name was not clear on the video, said that he wanted to bring back the Richland officers who initially were sent to Benton City to handle the crash involving Clasen.

“Then you can go handle that (one near Benton City). That way, you don’t have to worry about it,” the Richland sergeant told Munder.

Munder agreed, though he remained at the site for the next 40 minutes, including when Clasen’s husband, Trent, arrived.

Chris Loftis, WSP’s director of public affairs, later told the Herald, that it’s common for agencies at the scene of an overlapping jurisdiction to negotiate who will handle a case.

“It takes time to assess what you have, make notifications and decisions. These scene assessments occur through open discussions. There is no perfect timeframe in which this process should occur,” he explained.

8:26 p.m.

Munder was the first to ask Sarah Clasen about her husband, a former WSP sergeant who retired in 2018.

Sarah Clasen asked Munder if it was all right if Trent Clasen came to the scene, adding Trent was reluctant to just show up.

About five minutes later, she said her husband was coming, though she admitted to Munder, “He was drinking at home.”

“Hopefully, he’s not driving. He doesn’t need to be driving,” Munder answered.

“Oh. He’s not drunk, drunk. But he’s like, ‘I had a couple of drinks.’ I was like, ‘You can bring me a jacket, I’m pretty sure,” she told Munder.

While they’re waiting for Trent Clasen to arrive, Munder gave her a coat and what appeared to be a sports drink.

8:40 p.m.

Trent Clasen arrived and spoke with Munder, who was the only trooper still there. Munder told him that Richland police would be investigating. During their conversation Trent told Munder to “take care of her.”

After a few minutes, Sarah Clasen asked Munder, “So do I stay here?”

“Yeah. Stay here for now,” Munder answered. “I’ll go talk to him (the Richland sergeant) and see what he needs from you. I don’t know if you’re going to have to wait for their traffic guys to come here before.”

Richland police said she should wait there for their detectives to interview her.

About 10 minutes later, she asked Munder again if she could go home to change her bloody pants. It had been an hour and 20 minutes since the collision They again told her to wait for detectives to arrive.

Just before Munder turns off his body-cam recording about 9 p.m., Sarah Clasen told him she’d had a good day at work. She’d stopped 12 cars, including someone who had been driving drunk.

“I was like, ‘12 cars and a DUI isn’t a bad day,’” she told him.

8:45 p.m.

Munder is notified by other officers at the scene that Vega Sanchez died at the hospital.

9:16 p.m.

Richland’s detective, Heid, had arrived and approached Sarah Clasen and Munder, his body-cam shows.

After she described the crash, Heid repeated that they’re going to “run this like normal.” He asked if she would do field sobriety tests.

“I don’t think I want to do any,” she said, according to Heid’s body-cam footage obtained previously by the Herald.

“OK. What about PBT (preliminary breath test)? Are you willing to do voluntary PBT?” Heid asked.

“I don’t want to do any test based on the circumstances,” she responded.

He then asked if she is willing to write out a statement, and she agreed. After providing her with the form and a clipboard, he talked with several other officers. Heid mutes his body camera during that conversation. He returned to her about 15 minutes later. He asked Clasen to recount her version of what happened. She added that there was another car behind the motorcycle and that she was going 20 mph as she made the turn in her SUV.

“It wasn’t like I was trying to squeak in,” she said. “There was plenty of room.”

Heid tried a second time to get her to agree to sobriety tests or a preliminary breath test.

“I’ll be honest with you. I would love to rule out impairment, but without the fields (sobriety tests), it’s hard to rule that out. Obviously, it’s voluntary, I won’t ask again. There may always be that question down the road,” Heid told her.

“I’d just rather not,” Clasen responded. “I understand, but I know how it goes too.”

“What do you mean, you know how it goes?” Heid asked.

“Even if there is a little, if I had a glass of wine earlier or something like that. I just don’t want to do it,” Clasen said. “I definitely don’t feel impaired. I don’t feel like impairment was an issue.”

“Did you have a glass of wine earlier?” Heid asked.

“I’m not going to answer,” Clasen responded.

Heid then told other Richland officers at the scene he believed there was enough cause to arrest her on suspicion of DUI vehicular homicide.

He said he detected a faint smell of alcohol and her eyes were slightly glossy, and there are some spelling mistakes on her statement.

“I think she has something onboard,” he said, referring to her having been drinking.

Because of Sarah Clasen’s working relationship with local law enforcement, Benton County Prosecutor Eric Eisinger asked the Spokane Prosecutor’s Office to take over the case and to decide if she would be charged.

She was charged in September and pleaded innocent Sept. 24.

This story was originally published October 31, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Did a WA trooper get special treatment after a fatal crash? Look at the video."