Driver Gets 3 Years in Wreck Linked to Pot

A 20-year-old Panorama City man who crashed his car into another car, paralyzing a Northridge woman from the chest down, was sentenced Friday to three years in the California Youth Authority for driving under the influence of marijuana.

Van Nuys Superior Court Judge Richard A. Adler imposed the maximum sentence on Douglas D. Gray, convicted last month in the Jan. 11, 1985, collision in Chatsworth that broke Susan Tartakoff’s spine and left her wheelchair-bound.

Gray, who works at his father’s glass company, had smoked marijuana with his girlfriend at the Winnetka drive-in theater and then “began hot-rodding through the streets,” Deputy Dist. Atty. Walter Mueller said.

At Least 85 M.P.H.

Los Angeles police said they spotted Gray’s car driving north on Winnetka Avenue at a speed of at least 85 m.p.h. Gray then ran a red light and slammed into a car driven by Tartakoff, 37, who was going east on Devonshire Street, they said.

Tartakoff, formerly a computer programmer at Universal Studios, is undergoing treatment in Czechoslovakia. In a letter to the court, she said, “Douglas Gray has changed my life in no way I thought possible.”

“I only wish I could have been killed,” Tartakoff said in the letter, which was read by her husband. “I am dependent on nurses for all my needs.”

Judge Adler, in imposing the sentence, said Gray was trying to evade police at the time of the crash and had ignored his girlfriend’s plea to let her out of the car.

Gray’s defense attorney, Harold S. Vites, argued for a less severe sentence, saying that Gray feels sorrow for Tartakoff and pledges to never again smoke marijuana.