DETROIT -- On Thursday, General Motors will make public the results of its own investigation of how it responded to a deadly defect -- specifically, why it waited more than a decade to recall 2.6 million small cars with faulty ignition switches linked to at least 13 deaths. 
 
 Mikale Erickson, the father of two young children, died in November 2004 while riding in a Saturn Ion in Canton, Texas, when the car went off the road in the middle of the day. His fiancee, Candice Anderson, was driving. 
 
 There were no skid marks and no obvious cause. The airbags did not deploy. 
 
 Anderson was thrown through the windshield and barely survived. 
 
 Anderson had a trace amount of anti-anxiety medication in her system, but no other drugs or alcohol. She was charged with manslaughter, and pleaded guilty to criminal negligent homicide. 
 
 She told CBS News, "...it's been a question if I was at fault for his death, and I've carried it for so long." As a convicted felon living in a small town, she said, "every part of my life's been affected from it." 
 
 CBS News 
 
 In late May, Anderson learned Mikale's death was one of the 13 GM has linked to a faulty ignition switch. Mikale's mother, Rhonda Erickson, contacted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and they confirmed it in a letter. 
 
 Erickson said GM has not been in contact with her. She told CBS News, "I think they owe me an apology. They can't give me my son back. But, I mean, they could at least give me an apology." 
 
 Erickson believes since the car was defective, Anderson's record should be cleared. They are both hoping to get more answers from GM's internal investigation. ||||| In May 2007, five months before Ms. Anderson entered her guilty plea, G.M. had conducted an internal review of the crash and quietly ruled its car was to blame, but never let Ms. Anderson or local law enforcement officials know. 
 
 After the crash on Nov. 15, 2004, Ms. Anderson’s parents liquidated their 401(k) to retain a lawyer to defend her. While a deal with prosecutors spared her jail time, she was on probation for five years and paid more than $10,000 in fines and restitution. 
 
 She also suffered serious injuries in the accident, including a lacerated liver. But the guilt surrounding her own survival and her boyfriend’s death caused her more enduring pain, she said. 
 
 When the hearing was over on Monday, Ms. Anderson, her family, and Mr. Erickson’s mother, Rhonda, went together for the first time to visit Mr. Erickson’s grave. His headstone had been put up just last week, after his mother had struggled for years with the thought of purchasing one for her only child. 
 
 Ms. Anderson placed a bouquet of red roses on the grave after withdrawing a single one from the bunch. She said she handed the single rose to Ms. Erickson. 
 
 “This will change so many things,” Ms. Anderson said in the telephone interview. 
 
 On Monday, James R. Cain, a spokesman for G.M., said in a statement: “We have taken a neutral position on Ms. Anderson’s case. It is appropriate for the court to determine the legal status of Ms. Anderson.” 
 
 The automaker’s public acknowledgment linking Ms. Anderson’s crash to the defective ignition switch came in a letter from G.M.’s lawyers that was submitted by her lawyers to the district judge in Van Zandt County, Tex. 
 
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 Until this year, she wrestled with questions about her role in Mr. Erickson’s death. The police trooper who investigated the accident had deduced that Ms. Anderson was intoxicated before her drug test results came back. His police report referred to the seemingly inexplicable circumstances of the accident, her history of recreational drug use, “and Anderson’s behavior at the scene,” which was disoriented and emotional. 
 
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 G.M. did not disclose the switch’s role when federal safety regulators asked about the cause of the crash in a so-called death inquiry. Instead, in June 2007, the automaker wrote to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that it had not assessed the cause of the crash when, in fact, it had: A G.M. engineer had found just a month earlier that power to the vehicle had most likely shut off. 
 
 The district attorney who prosecuted Ms. Anderson, Leslie Poynter Dixon, and the police trooper who investigated the accident had both said that if the ignition-switch defect had been publicly known at the time of the crash, certain details of the accident — like the lack of skid marks or evasive action — would have been seen differently. 
 
 “At the time, unbeknownst to Ms. Anderson or my office, there were issues regarding her 2004 Saturn Ion,” Ms. Poynter Dixon wrote in a letter in support of Ms. Anderson in July. “Had I known at the time that G.M. knew of these issues and has since admitted to such, I do not believe the grand jury would have indicted her for intoxication manslaughter.” 
 
 In May, The New York Times reported that General Motors considered Mr. Erickson a victim of its faulty ignition switch. Ms. Anderson learned of her accident’s inclusion in G.M.’s tally after Mr. Erickson’s mother sought confirmation from federal regulators at the request of The Times. 
 
 After Ms. Anderson’s story was first reported, her lawyer, Robert Hilliard, and federal lawmakers called on Mary T. Barra, G.M.’s chief executive, to support a pardon. 
 
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 At a congressional hearing in July, Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, called Ms. Anderson’s indictment “a perversion of the justice process,” and asked Ms. Barra and Michael P. Millikin, G.M.’s top lawyer, to contact Gov. Rick Perry of Texas to urge a pardon for Ms. Anderson. Both declined although they offered to submit “evidence to support” Ms. Anderson’s exoneration. 
 
 On Monday, Mr. Blumenthal praised the ruling. “Her plight demonstrates just how far the consequences of General Motors’ concealment go,” he said, “hurting not just direct victims of defective cars but also those who were blamed for the accidents even when G.M. knew full well what the cause had been.” 
 
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 Ms. Anderson said she still had not heard from G.M. directly. 
 
 “I don’t expect I ever will,” she said. Ms. Anderson said she would accept a payment from the automaker’s victim compensation program run by Kenneth R. Feinberg. “My plan is to take the compensation and take this clearing of my record and move on with my life.” 
 
 Mr. Cain said that Mr. Feinberg’s compensation program “is set up to evaluate claims without consideration of contributory negligence.” 
 
 Having long worked as a home health aide and currently in pursuit of a nursing degree, Ms. Anderson said she had suffered professionally from being a convicted criminal. To be accepted to nursing school, she had to petition the Texas Board of Nursing and pay for a psychiatric examination to prove her mental stability. With her criminal record, she would have been barred from at-home caregiving and hospice work, and she had been worried about finding full-time work after graduation. 
 
 “Who wants someone taking care of their mother if they have homicide on their record?” she said. 
 
 Beyond its practical effects on her work, Ms. Anderson said her cleared record would significantly affect her life in other ways. She said that someday she would tell the story of her exoneration to her daughters, now 4 and 6. 
 
 “My heart is going to be a lot lighter to be able to tell them, ‘This is what happened, this horrible thing. And it wasn’t Mommy’s fault.’ ” ||||| HOUSTON (AP) — A Texas judge cleared a woman Monday for a car accident that killed her fiance in 2004, after General Motors acknowledged that her car would have been among millions being recalled for a problem that may have contributed to the death. 
 
 Candice Anderson was driving a 2004 Saturn Ion when it suddenly veered off a road about 60 miles east of Dallas and slammed into a tree. Anderson, then 21, was severely injured when the car's air bags failed to deploy. Her 25-year-old fiance, Gene Erikson, who was a passenger, was killed. 
 
 She later pleaded guilty to charges stemming from the wreck. But during a hearing Monday, State District Judge Teresa Drum expunged the conviction from her record, according to officials in the Van Zandt County court and Anderson's attorney, Bob Hilliard. 
 
 In a letter given to the court ahead of the hearing, an attorney for the automaker confirmed that Anderson's Saturn would have been among 2.6 million GM vehicles recalled in February to address ignition switches that can slip out of the "run" position, causing the engines to stall and disabling power steering, brakes and air bags. 
 
 Anderson's crash "is one in which the recall condition may have caused or contributed to the frontal air bag non-deployment in the accident," attorney Richard C. Godfrey wrote. Hilliard provided a copy of the letter to The Associated Press, and Godfrey confirmed its contents Monday. 
 
 Anderson was initially charged with criminally negligent homicide because there was no clear explanation at the time why the wreck occurred, according to court documents from the case. She pleaded guilty to a letter charge in 2006, and was sentenced to five years' probation. She also was ordered to perform 260 hours of community service, pay court costs and cover the costs of Erikson's funeral. 
 
 "GM knew this defect caused this death, yet instead of telling the truth watched silently as Candice was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter," Hilliard said Monday. "It took 10 years for GM to find its voice." 
 
 In a separate statement issued by the company, GM said it "cooperated fully by providing technical information that was requested to make a decision in this matter." The carmaker also said the issue in Anderson's case was for local law enforcement and courts to consider. 
 
 "That's why we took a neutral position on Ms. Anderson's case," the company's statement said. "It was appropriate for the court to determine the legal status of Ms. Anderson." 
 
 A federal lawsuit filed against GM by Anderson and Erickson's family was dropped after the parties agreed to resolve their claims through a compensation program being run by Kenneth Feinberg, an attorney hired by GM to compensate victims of ignition switch crashes. 
 
 Feinberg released data Monday showing he has agreed to make payments in 35 death claims and 44 injury cases, up from 33 death claims last week. Feinberg has received 225 death claims and 1,955 injury claims since August. The deadline to file claims is Jan. 31, 2015. 
 
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 AP Auto Writer Tom Krisher contributed to this report from Detroit.
– On a November 2004 morning in Texas, Candice Anderson was driving her fiance, Mikale Erickson, to pick up his car from a friend's house when her Saturn Ion failed to negotiate a slight curve, went off the road, and hit a tree. The airbags did not deploy and there were no skid marks; Erickson was killed, and Anderson barely survived. She had a trace amount of Xanax in her system at the time, and though there were no other drugs nor alcohol present, authorities charged her with intoxication manslaughter. She ultimately pleaded guilty to criminally negligent homicide and served five years' probation, though she always wondered what caused the accident—she has no memory of the day. Late last month, she found out: Erickson's death is one of the 13 GM has linked to its faulty ignition switches; the car had lost power, which would have also disabled the airbags. "It's been a question if I was at fault for his death, and I've carried it for so long," Anderson tells CBS News. "Every part of my life's been affected from it." Last month, Erickson's mother, Rhonda, explained to the New York Times that she had initially been angry with her son, who was 25 at the time, and Anderson, who was 21, assuming their recklessness (they had both experimented with recreational drugs, possibly as recently as the night prior to the accident) was the cause of the accident. But now she knows the truth—she wrote to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to have it confirmed—and she believes Anderson's record should be cleared. Both women also want an apology from GM, which never contacted the Erickson family to assume responsibility for the crash.