Isaiah Sadowski has been sentenced to 10 years and three months in state prison for the December 2021 death of 75-year-old Barbara Patterson.
A Johnson County jury unanimously convicted Sadowski of reckless second-degree murder back in June, after two and a half hours of deliberations.
Barbara Patterson was killed in a crash on December 27, 2021, at 127th Street and Quivira Road in Overland Park.
The crash happened around 8:30 p.m., when Sadowski, driving a red Chevrolet Camaro, ran a red light and hit a silver Nissan Versa driven by Barbara Patterson.
Patterson died at the scene.
Going 100 miles per hour
Police and crash reconstruction experts determined that Sadowski had been driving over 100 mph on Quivira Road shortly before the crash. The posted speed limit on that stretch of Quivira is 45 mph.
Data recovered from his car indicated the Camaro was being driven at nearly 74 mph a half second before impact and that even with “extreme hard braking” Sadowski was still going 63 mph when he crashed into Patterson’s car.
Traffic camera footage showed the red light Sadowski ignored had been red for 12 seconds when his car entered the intersection.
Police determined that Sadowski’s blood alcohol level was 0.13 approximately two hours after the crash. The legal limit in Kansas is 0.08 for those 21 and older and 0.02 for anyone 20 or younger. Sadowski was 20 at the time of the crash.
Sadowski was first charged in February 2022, and his case was set for trial when he fled from Johnson County in March of 2024.
Sadowski fled to Mexico
While on the run, Sadowski appeared on a YouTube channel called “Second_chancer.”
In the approximately 19-minute video, Sadowski said he was on the run in another country because he was being treated unfairly by Overland Park police and the Johnson County District Attorney’s Office.
He also made several specific claims regarding his pending case, including his belief that the actions of paramedics at the scene of the crash were the reason for Patterson’s death.
Sadowski was on the run in Mexico for about 520 days before he was arrested during an August 2025 joint operation between the U.S. Marshals Service and Mexican law enforcement and subsequently extradited to Texas and then back to Johnson County.
Johnson County District Court Judge Thomas Kelly Ryan sentenced Sadowski to 123 months in state prison, the maximum sentence for the second-degree murder conviction.
“She was an angel”
Before the judge handed down the sentence, the court heard from friends and family of both Patterson and Sadowski.
Patterson’s son, Michael Pence, tearfully addressed the judge during victim impact statements and pointed out that he has now been without his mother for 1,724 days, “because someone’s a coward and ran to Mexico,” he said while looking at Sadowski.
“I was really gearing myself up to come sit and go through the trial in March of 2024, but when I showed up, he didn’t,” Pence said. “He disobeyed; he took advantage of the court when you were kind enough to remove ankle monitoring and allow him a little bit of freedom. He took advantage and ran to Mexico.”
Lou Holsapple, Patterson’s brother, said that on the night of the crash, Patterson was on her way home from a family gathering and didn’t drive on the highway.
“We contacted each other daily and never ended a conversation without each of us saying ‘I love you’,” Holsapple told the court. “She was an angel.”
Barbara’s family also reminded the court that Sadowski fled to Mexico after hiring and firing three different attorneys to represent him.
Sadowski was represented at trial by his fourth attorney, Joseph Simons of the Simons Law Office in Boston, Massachusetts.
“Inexcusable”
On the other side, Sadowski’s character witnesses included several friends from Alcoholics Anonymous meetings who have gotten to know him in the years after the fatal crash, as well as a high school classmate, a business partner and family members.
Sadowski’s parents, Paul Sadowski and Phyllis Krupka, both talked about how they began fostering Isaiah in Colorado when he was four months old and his birth parents were too young to care for him properly. They adopted him shortly after and raised him as their own son, eventually moving to Overland Park.
Both parents pointed to at least 14 known concussions that their son had sustained throughout his childhood, from slips and falls to his batting helmet being struck by a pitched baseball, up until a car accident in September 2021, which they say Sadowski was still dealing with when he was involved in the crash that killed Patterson.
His mother directed part of her statement to Patterson’s family, expressing her sympathy and grief for their loss, saying that she wanted to contact them sooner, but was advised not to, as it may negatively impact her son’s case.
Just before the court handed down his sentence, Isaiah Sadowski, who will turn 25 next week, addressed the court himself.
“No one deserves the pain, anguish, and suffering that I created,” Sadowski said. “No apology or action will ever bring her back or make it right; no dollar figure or words will ever fill the void or replace what’s lost, and what’s lost is an incredible human being.”
He also acknowledged that fleeing to and remaining in Mexico only made things worse for him and his case, calling it “selfish” and “inexcusable.”
The final sentencing
Judge Ryan addressed numerous issues the defense raised in its request for a new trial. All of those requests were denied.
He also addressed the previous lawyers that Sadowski had hired and then dismissed, saying, “You had three top-notch attorneys from this area.”
“You performed in an exemplary way while you were on pre-trial supervision,” Judge Ryan said. “What these folks [Barbara Patterson’s family] went through was an untold number of days, maybe forever.”
He also called Sadowski’s escape to Mexico “pretty sophisticated for a young person” and referred to Sadowski’s statements from the YouTube interview as “salt in the wounds.”
“During the trial, when you were up testifying, I made a note of it, you couldn’t say you killed Miss Patterson,” Judge Ryan said. “You had kind of a way of saying it, but you couldn’t just say, ‘Yeah, I did it’.”
Sadowski will receive credit for 407 days already served in jail and will be required to register as a violent offender for 15 years.
Online court records show that Sadowski’s defense team filed a notice of appeal. That document was electronically filed with the court at 2:30 p.m., about one hour into the five-hour sentencing hearing.
