Nearly two years after pleading not guilty to vehicular manslaughter, Santa Maria resident David Baskett agreed to plead guilty to killing a local resident while driving a forklift.
Baskett’s March 24 plea followed new evidence that Santa Barbara County Deputy District Attorney Ryan Clausen said contradicted what the 83-year-old originally told Santa Maria Police Department (SMPD) officers.
“The defendant intentionally provided false information to SMPD at the time of the crash,” Clausen wrote in court documents.
On May 2, 2024, Chumash Casino bus driver Alberto Paz was heading south down Skyway Drive around 3 p.m. when an obstacle in the road ahead forced him to switch lanes.
Moments later, Paz saw in his rearview mirror a pickup truck run into the same obstacle he’d just maneuvered away from—8-foot-long steel blades sticking out from a 21-foot-long forklift at the corner of Hangar Street and Skyway.
The forklift prongs were elevated 4 feet from the ground when they sliced through the truck’s windshield, hit passenger Tiffany Ann Peterson in the head, and killed her instantly, according to court documents. She was 39.
Her father, Charlie Peterson, the truck’s driver, 65 at the time, was injured but survived the crash.
“The front of the truck was thrown into the air, eventually coming to a stop further down Skyway after it hit a fire hydrant,” court documents stated.
When authorities arrived that afternoon, SMPD officers questioned Baskett and asked him to show them where the forklift he’d been driving was at the time of the crash.
“The only information SMPD officers had at the time regarding the exact location of the forklift came from [the] defendant,” Deputy District Attorney Clausen said in court documents.
The District Attorney’s Office asked the Police Department to conduct a reconstruction of the scene after a Feb. 20, 2026, pre-trial proceeding where county Superior Court Judge Karen O’Neil determined that the pickup truck’s speed before crashing “may be relevant” to a jury trial, along with testimony from an expert witness on behalf of the defense.
“At that [Feb. 20] hearing, defendant’s expert estimated the speed of the truck the victim was in at over 76 miles per hour based on measurements that SMPD took on the day of the crash,” Clausen said in court documents.
The speed limit on Skyway Drive is 55 mph.
In June 2024, the Chumash Casino Resort provided video footage from bus driver Paz’s shuttle “which shows the forklift’s position moments before the crash,” according to court documents.
“When you compare the location of the forklift in the video to the location where defendant positioned it for SMPD’s photographs and measurements, the forklift was clearly positioned by defendant farther back from the roadway than it had actually been at the time of impact,” Clausen argued in court.
Paz described the truck as traveling behind him “at a similar speed” to the bus, roughly 52 mph, according to Clausen.
“Based on … the video from the Chumash bus, the statement of the bus driver, and the testimony of the defense expert, … I requested that SMPD use the same forklift to create accurate demonstrative evidence showing the forklift in the same position it was in on the video,” Clausen wrote.
The bus’s video footage the Police Department used to reconstruct the crime scene on Feb. 26 wasn’t available to officers the day of the fatal collision, court documents explained. On March 2, Judge O’Neil ruled that Baskett’s defense didn’t get adequate notice about the new reconstruction evidence and granted the defense’s motion for a mistrial.
“The people’s argument was that the disclosure did not violate the rules of discovery and that the reconstruction would not be used except to rebut a potential defense argument,” Clausen told the Sun via email. “However, the defense argued that they would not be able to competently represent the defendant without more time to review the new information. Based on that representation from the defense, we could not have proceeded with trial.”
Less than a month later, Baskett pleaded guilty to one misdemeanor count of vehicular manslaughter as part of a plea agreement with the District Attorney’s Office. Along with his year-long probation sentence, he was ordered to complete a traffic safety course and 100 hours of community service and is forbidden from driving any heavy equipment.
‘The defendant intentionally provided false information to SMPD at the time of the crash.’
—Santa Barbara County Deputy District Attorney Ryan Clausen
The Sun reached out to Baskett and his defense attorney, Adrienne Harbottle, for comment, but did not receive a response from either before press time.
“The maximum sentence for the crime he is charged with would be one year in the county jail,” Clausen told the Sun via email. “I cannot speculate on what the judge would have sentenced him to had trial continued.”
Formerly a Santa Maria Public Airport District board member, Baskett was listed in court documents as the CEO of International Emergency Services Inc., a company located at the airport.
On the day of the collision in 2024, Baskett was driving a CAT TL1255 telehandler forklift to “move items” at the airport’s hangars that belonged to International Emergency Services Inc. The 21-foot-long forklift model was a rental, and Baskett was on his way back to Quinn Rentals in Santa Maria when he drove up to merge onto Skyway Drive from Hangar Street, according to court documents.
Since June 2024, Baskett has been engaged in an active civil lawsuit against the Santa Maria Public Airport District that stemmed from the fatal collision he was convicted of. Not long after the crash, according to Baskett, his air operations area (AOA) badge was revoked, and he was unable to re-enter the hangar where he was working that day.
“I have now been shut out of the AOA for more than 50 days since the lockout, which started less than two hours after the tragic accident,” Baskett wrote in his complaint on June 26, 2024.
“This case is about the violation of civil rights of an elected official, a tenant, and a veteran,” he continued. “Each day the unjustified lockout continues is another day of harm.”
Baskett last amended the ongoing lawsuit this year on Jan. 14. Along with accusing the airport of violating his civil and tenant rights, Baskett accused the Airport District of theft, destroying private property, breaking and entering, and breach of lease agreement.
Baskett’s experience as an elected official isn’t limited to his former role on the Airport District’s board. His current term on the Santa Maria Joint Union High School District’s board ends this December. He was elected in 2022.
Kenny Klein, public information officer for the school district, told the Sun via email that meeting the eligibility requirements to serve on the board includes not being legally disqualified from holding civil office.
“A person is legally disqualified if they have been convicted of certain offenses. While we are unaware of the specific terms of Mr. Baskett’s plea agreement, disqualifying convictions generally include certain felonies, not misdemeanors,” Klein explained, “or crimes involving the member’s official duties.”
There’s no official process to remove an elected member like Baskett from his position if, hypothetically, his peers on the school board were to want to vote him out of office, as “the board has no authority to remove another elected official from the board,” Klein said.
Reach Senior Staff Writer Caleb Wiseblood at cwiseblood@santamariasun.com.
This article appears in April 2 – April 9, 2026.