Driver May Face Murder Charge in Girl’s Death

Los Angeles police say they will seek a murder charge against a 46-year-old insurance salesman who allegedly was drunk when he rammed his car into a house in the Hollywood Hills on Wednesday night, killing a sleeping 4-year-old girl.

The driver, James Benjamin Masoner, who lives on the same street as the girl did, was convicted of drunk driving in Orange County in 1982 and sentenced to three years of probation, police said Thursday.

Detective Don Bellante said the accident occurred moments after Masoner insisted on taking the wheel of his car near his home, where two friends had driven him from a party because they believed he was too intoxicated to drive himself.

But instead of pulling up to his house, Masoner sped off in the other direction and crashed at 9:24 p.m. into the house in the 3800 block of Broadlawn Drive, the detective said.

Jessica Shaner, 4, who was asleep on a couch in a den, was pinned under Masoner’s 1983 car and was pronounced dead at the scene, Detective Frank Rodriguez said.

The car crashed through the den, through a bedroom and into the master bedroom, where it stopped inches short of the girl’s 10-week-old brother, Morgan, who was sleeping in a bassinet. The infant was uninjured, but the children’s mother, Barbara Shaner, 34, was cut by flying debris. She was released after treatment at St. Joseph Medical Center in Burbank.

“All of a sudden there was just heat and noise, and insanity was in the air,” said the children’s father, Timothy Shaner, 39, who also was sleeping in the master bedroom.

“I opened my eyes, and no more than a foot away from me was the side of a car. The driver wasn’t slumped over the wheel or anything . . . he looked like a mannequin.

“The motor was just racing, like he had the pedal to the floor. I reached in, started to grab the keys and told him, ‘Turn it off, turn it off!’ and he just sat there.”

Timothy Shaner said that after helping Masoner turn off the ignition, he “jumped over the back of the car to find my wife was shrieking, ‘Where’s Jessie? Where’s Jessie?’ ”

“All I could see were fragments of couch everywhere,” he said. “It had just exploded.

“The TV had fallen over and crashed and was blaring. I went over to the TV and shut it off . . . then I turned the rubble over and started looking for my daughter. I couldn’t find her anywhere.”

His wife had been hanging up clothes in the closet of the girl’s bedroom, the middle room through which the car passed, he said.

Bellante said Masoner, an agent for a Wilshire Boulevard insurance company, had been drinking at a gathering of insurance workers at an undisclosed location and “during the course of this ‘open house’ apparently he became intoxicated to the point where it was obvious to some of his friends,” one of whom drove Masoner in Masoner’s car while the other drove his own car to Masoner’s neighborhood.

He said Masoner “wasn’t 100% cooperative” with the friends and insisted that he was capable of driving when they reached a cul-de-sac, at which a narrow, private road slopes uphill to a dead end, where he lives. At that point, Bellante said, Masoner insisted on taking the wheel of his car.

The friends finally agreed, only to see Masoner “take off” down a hill toward the Shaner home. Then “they heard what they described as a loud thud, for lack of a better word,” he said.

The Shaners’ house is located at a sharp curve on a hilly street in a neighborhood just south of Cahuenga Boulevard, across from Universal City, and police said that Masoner’s car apparently became airborne on the curve and crashed through a plate glass window, then continued through the rooms.

Investigators theorized that the Shaners’ baby may have been saved by a dresser, which was found wedged between the bumper of Masoner’s car and a wall of the master bedroom. Next to the dresser, and also wedged between the car and the wall, was the bassinet, which was damaged, he said.

“It was a miracle,” Timothy Shaner said.

Masoner was arrested on suspicion of murder. Bellante said there was no separate drunk-driving allegation because police thought it sufficient to arrest Masoner only on the most severe allegation. He was being held without bail in Van Nuys Jail pending an arraignment today or Monday in Van Nuys Municipal Court, police said.

Police said they will ask the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office to file a murder charge against Masoner, Bellante said, although he did not say what degree of murder would be sought.