Couch’s case will be transferred by 19th birthday in April. He had previously been incarcerated in a juvenile detention center.
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A hearing to set his probation terms has not yet been scheduled.
“What’s 120 days in county?” “I do believe, from seeing him and talking to him, that it’s become more real to him”.
Couch arrived at the courthouse at approximately 8:45 a.m., clean shaven, and wearing a red prison jumpsuit.
Couch will remain in jail for now in solitary confinement, Tarrant County Sheriff Dee Anderson said.
“He’s very stoic. He doesn’t express any emotions any one way or the other. But there have been no, in my presence, feelings of remorse or questions of guilt or feeling sorry for the people whose lives he’s ended”. He and his mother were eventually taken into custody later that month in the resort town of Puerto Vallarta.
Couch and his mother, Tonya Couch, disappeared in December after a video surfaced on social media appearing to show the teen at a party where alcohol was served, and he later missed an appointment with his probation officer.
No cameras or phones were permitted in the courtroom.
Couch’s attorney Scott Brown addressed reporters.
Brown said Couch has been “doing well” in jail. “I hope that the attention placed on this event will cause one family to have one discussion that will cause one person to not get behind the wheel and drink and drive”, said Prosecutor Riley Shaw.
The Inquisitr reports that Couch was already awaiting his move-affluenza-teen-to-adult-jail-1990/”>adult court date, February 19, while sitting in an adult prison the entire time.
Authorities pushed for the move to the adult court.
An adult court judge will decide the conditions of Couch’s probation, which could include between 120 to 180 days in jail.
America’s “affluenza” teen had his case transferred to the adult court system on Friday, where 18-year-old Texan Ethan Couch faces decades behind bars if he violates a probation deal that kept him out of prison for killing four people while driving drunk.
“Judge Menikos can also choose to let him go with conditions”, she said. Any probation violation could also land Couch in jail.
Had Couch faced the charges of violating his probation in juvenile court, and been found guilty, he could eventually have faced a prison term of 10 years, once he aged out of the juvenile system at 19.
Her son initially fought deportation but later dropped the fight and was returned to Texas in late January.
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A judge on Friday sent the Texas teenager who used an “affluenza” defense in a fatal drunken-driving wreck to adult court, raising the possibility that he could get jail time for the 2013 crash that killed four people.
