RTD Driver to Face Charge of Manslaughter

A vehicular manslaughter charge will be filed against a fired RTD driver whose bus turned over on the Hollywood Freeway, fatally injuring a passenger, prosecutors said Thursday.

The misdemeanor complaint will be filed today when the driver, Shirley Jean Riojas, 26, is scheduled to be arraigned in Los Angeles Municipal Court, according to Los Angeles city attorney’s spokesman Mike Qualls.

The charge carries a maximum one-year jail sentence upon conviction.

Southern California Rapid Transit District officials said they fired Riojas after she tested positive in a drug test administered after the July 31 crash, in which 27 passengers were injured. One of them, Lois K. Welbon, 67, of Tarzana, had part of a leg amputated after the accident and died at a hospital Sept. 15.

No Evidence of Drug Use

Qualls said, however, that there was no evidence that Riojas, who had begun working as a trainee driver six weeks before the accident, had been using drugs.

“The information we have is that the California Highway Patrol drug recognition unit examined her at the scene of the crash and reported she was not under the influence of alcohol, drugs or any combination thereof,” he said.

The coroner’s autopsy report said Welbon died of heart disease, Qualls said. Riojas was originally charged with the infraction of making an unsafe lane change, but the complaint was amended to include manslaughter after a CHP report showed that the traffic accident contributed to the woman passenger’s death, Qualls said.

The accident occurred as a result of a belated attempt by Riojas to steer into a passenger loading turnout near Vermont Avenue.

Another Driver Charged

Riojas is the second RTD driver to be charged with manslaughter in recent weeks. Cathy Stanley Miles, 38, is to be arraigned Nov. 21 on charges of hit-and-run driving as well as manslaughter in the death last month of a 55-year-old man in the Los Feliz area.

Meanwhile, RTD officials Thursday released a new report that shows that their safety record improved in the fiscal year that ended in June.

The report, which covers a variety of RTD operations and must be filed annually with the federal government, set the official bus accident rate of the district at 4.3 collisions per 100,000 miles. The comparable figure for the previous 1984-85 fiscal year was 4.9, and the rate was 5.1 in 1983-84, officials said.

The district’s buses travel about 105 million miles a year.

Fatalities and injuries involving RTD mishaps also were down, according to the report. Nine people died as a result of accidents involving RTD vehicles in 1985-86.

Ten Deaths in ‘84-’85

Ten people died as a result of accidents in 1984-85. Accident-related injuries dropped from 3,625 in 1984-85 to 3,092 in 1985-86, the report says.

RTD officials this year are using a new information-gathering system that permits them to report actual collisions, rather than an accident estimate, as was used in previous years. As a result, the official accident rate reported to the federal government last year was 7.4 accidents per 100,000 miles--a figure RTD officials have recently insisted is erroneous.