A young man pleaded no contest Friday to charges stemming from a DUI crash on New Year’s Eve in 2023 in South Los Angeles that killed three people, including a 5-year-old girl, and seriously injured the girl’s younger sister.
Jordan Kahari Isaac was immediately sentenced to 11 years and eight months in state prison following his plea to three counts of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and one count of driving under the influence of alcohol causing bodily injury, according to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office.
Three murder charges against him resulting from the crash were dismissed at a July 2025 hearing in which he was ordered to stand trial on the charges that remained, according to court records.
Isaac — who will turn 25 on Saturday — was taken to a hospital after the crash and treated for serious but non-life-threatening injuries, authorities said.
Investigators said the speeding driver, identified as Isaac, ran a stop sign at 60th Place and Normandie Avenue and slammed into the sedan carrying the family of four at about 11:20 p.m.
Los Angeles Police Detective Ryan Moreno told reporters soon afterward that the crash “was so violent” that it sent the family’s car careening through a street sign and a fence, coming to rest outside a nearby business. The detective said some people who heard the crash described it as sounding like an “explosion,” adding that several good Samaritans ran to the scene and “tried to do what they could.”
“Mr. Isaac’s negligence and disregard for the safety of others resulted in the tragic death of a father, mother and their 5-year-old child,” then-District Attorney George Gascón said in a statement shortly after the case was filed in January 2024. “Not only was this young family destroyed, but left behind a 1-year-old who was also injured in the crash and now left to live a life without their family.”
The father, identified by his daughter Angie on a GoFundMe page as Jose Manuel Pascagaza, 49, was pronounced dead at the scene and his 5-year-old daughter, Mia, died at a hospital. The mother, Luisa Bernal, 30, who was in the front passenger seat, was hospitalized with major injuries and subsequently died, according to police and the GoFundMe page.
The couple’s other daughter, 1-year-old Hanna, was injured in the crash.
Angie Pascagaza wrote on the GoFundMe post that she hoped to raise money so the bodies of her parents and sister can be returned to Colombia “to give them a Christian burial with the whole family.” She wrote that the family had moved to California in November 2022 “looking for a better future for themselves and the girls since in Colombia the situation in the country was not very good.”
Friends and neighbors created a memorial to the family with photos, flowers and candles near the intersection of 60th Place and Normandie Avenue after the crash.