A former Penn State football wide receiver will spend nine to 23 months in prison for a drunken driving ATV accident that killed his girlfriend last year.
Bradford County Judge Maureen T. Beirne ordered Julian Crushshon-Fleming, 25, of Elysburg to serve the time at the county prison during a sentencing hearing Monday.
Fleming pleaded guilty in April to involuntary manslaughter and driving under the influence of alcohol in the May 23, 2025, crash that killed Alyssa Boyd, 23, of Bloomsburg.
The crash occurred shortly after 8 p.m. on Painter Lick Lane in Columbia Twp.
One witness saw Boyd, wearing a hoodie, riding on the back of an ATV that Fleming drove. He wore a baseball cap. Neither wore a helmet, police said. The witness, from her yard, heard “the ATV turn around and (begin) ‘winding up to get going,’” according to an arrest affidavit.
“After the ATV got out of sight, she heard a pop (and) then three banging sounds,” the affidavit written by Trooper Alexander Gregoire says.
Witness describes crash scene
A driver who came upon the crash scene told state police he found Boyd and Fleming lying on the road with Fleming just waking up. After the witness called his mother, she and a neighbor came to the scene and tried to revive Boyd.
Fleming walked around, talked coherently, tried to check Boyd for a pulse “and was obviously frantic and upset,” a witness told Gregoire.
The witness put a T-shirt on Fleming’s bleeding head. As they sat on a pickup truck’s tailgate, Fleming said he was driving the ATV north “and a deer jumped in front of them,” according to the affidavit.
He was drunk
Police found the blue 2024 Yamaha ATV damaged, Boyd lying dead in the road and covered with a tarp, a dead deer on the side of the road and deer hair on the ATV.
Fleming told troopers he drank five or six beers before the crash. A test on his blood found an alcohol level of 0.118%. In Pennsylvania, 0.08% is the legal limit. An autopsy showed Boyd died of multiple traumatic injuries. Fleming was treated first at a Troy hospital then at Robert Packer Hospital in Sayre.
Police originally charged Fleming with homicide and aggravated assault by vehicle while driving under the influence. Both carry maximum penalties of up to 10 years in prison.
They also charged him with homicide and aggravated assault by vehicle, driving under the influence and four traffic citations. The homicide and aggravated assault charges carry maximum penalties of up to seven years in prison.
The driving under the influence charge, an ungraded misdemeanor, carries a maximum sentence of six months in prison.
DA defends plea deal
Under a plea agreement, District Attorney Richard Wilson dropped the more serious charges, kept the DUI and added involuntary manslaughter, which carries a maximum of up to five years in prison.
“This was an extremely unfortunate case,” Wilson said in a post on his Facebook. “While we were confident that we could prove Crushshon-Fleming committed a DUI offense, proving the connection between that and the death of the victim would be difficult.”
The post says, “there was no guarantee that a jury would unanimously agree that he was guilty of those (more serious charges) after a trial.”
“While Crushshon-Fleming’s intoxication did not help matters, a jury would likely conclude that the collision with the deer caused the riders to crash, and therefore the victim’s death, not the alcohol intoxication,” Wilson said. "Manslaughter is therefore an appropriate resolution.”
Fleming, a record-setting star player at Southern Columbia High School in Columbia County, was considered one of the top college football recruits in the country in 2020, though he never lived up to the billing after four years at Ohio State and a final season at Penn State in 2024.
'A talented artist'
Boyd, a Central Columbia High School graduate, was a standout athlete there in soccer, track and basketball.
After high school, she took up golf and “was a talented artist,” according to her obituary. She was studying psychology at the University of Alabama and expected to graduate last December.
“She loved life, enjoyed socializing and was very outgoing. She could light up any room with her amazing and beautiful energy,” the obituary said.
