Tragedy on Broadlawn Drive : In a Drunken Second, Two Sets of Lives Changed Forever

March 4, 1987. It was about 9 o’clock on a quiet Wednesday evening at the Shaner home. Four-year-old Jessica had dressed in her pink bodysuit and tutu--she called it her “Tinker Bell” costume--and settled on the den sofa to watch her favorite “Care Bears” video.

Her mother, Barbara, having nursed the baby, Morgan, and put him to bed, was in Jessica’s room putting away clean clothes. Her father, Tim, had been up at 5:30 a.m. to go to work and, feeling the effects of the sleepless nights that come with a new baby, was napping in the master bedroom.

Caravan En Route

Two cars in caravan, the first delivering James Masoner home from an office party, wound their way slowly up Broadlawn Drive across the freeway from Universal City, past the Shaner house at 3817, negotiating the S-curve, up the steep incline to the cul-de-sac where Masoner lived.

Minutes later, one of those cars, a silver-gray 1983 Camaro, California license 1JET460, with Masoner at the wheel, hurtled out-of-control back down Broadlawn, failed to negotiate a sharp right turn and smashed through the den of the Shaner house, slamming the sofa with Jessica on it through a wall, picking up the bunk beds in her room and pushing them through another wall, coming to a stop inches from the bed where Tim Shaner slept.

When the smoke and dust had cleared, paramedics found the body of Jessica Shaner. It was so badly traumatized that relatives made the decision to have a closed casket for her funeral six days later at Forest Lawn in Glendale.

Dec. 4, 1987. After deliberating for three days, the jury found James Benjamin Masoner, 47, guilty of second-degree murder, gross vehicular manslaughter and two felony drunk driving charges. He will spend Christmas in county jail, awaiting sentencing on Jan. 8.

Entwined in Tragedy

In a few horrible minutes, strangers’ lives had become forever entwined in tragedy. The Shaners, who happened to live in the path of a drunk driver’s car, were now innocent victims. Masoner’s unextraordinary life had turned into a nightmare. Facing a maximum sentence of 15 years to life, he reflects on those few minutes that night that, he says, “will replay in my head the rest of my life.”

There were two houses for sale on Broadlawn when Barbara and Tim Shaner were house-hunting in 1973. They liked both but, Barbara recalls, they “felt good” the minute they walked into 3817, a cozy 38-year-old bungalow that had gone on the market only that day. “There was no question,” she said. “You just know when it’s the right one.”

They bought the house in July. Some time afterwards, 3717 up the hill also sold. The buyer: James Masoner.

These were happy, fun-filled days for Barbara. She and Tim, who had met as students at L.A. Valley College, had married in 1973, buying this house, their first, that same year. Both loved the time spent there; only recently, they had finished remodeling the den and it was Tim’s pride and joy.

It was work as usual March 4 for Tim Shaner at Anderson Desk in Glendale, where he was a manager in purchasing and inventory control. But Barbara, who had been working in public relations, had decided to stay home for six months after the birth of Morgan, who was then 3 months old.

After a quiet dinner that night at the Shaner home, Jessica prevailed on her parents to allow her to stay up to watch cartoons. She and her mother had had what Barbara looks back on as “a particularly special day. We painted her fingernails, did very special things together.” Jessica did not go to preschool on Wednesdays.

They had waited 10 years to have a child and Jessica was a special blessing, a happy, healthy little girl. Barbara and her blond, brown-eyed daughter took swim-gym classes together. The family had started going to Episcopal church in Studio City, Jessica to Sunday school. If Barbara took on free-lance assignments, she worked her schedule around Jessica. One night each week, Tim treated his daughter to pizza at Chuck E Cheese.

As a family, they went to Y Camp Fox on Santa Catalina Island. “She was such a big part of our lives,” Tim said.

They wanted another child but, Barbara said: “We really made a conscious decision to wait until she was four. We didn’t want her to feel she was being pushed aside.”

On March 19, two weeks after the accident, Jessica Shaner would have been 5 years old.

That afternoon, James Masoner and associates from Neal Lloyd Insurance had lunched at Le Dome in West Hollywood, a wet lunch that, for him, included a couple of martinis, a cordial and champagne afterward in the bar. It was late afternoon when Masoner returned to his office in the 3300 block of Wilshire Boulevard.

He had been employed by Neal Lloyd West as a middle manager since January, a job he had been pleased to get after another insurance company for which he had worked had gone under. Professionally, things were, in Masoner’s words, “hunky dorey.”

About 6 p.m. Masoner turned up at the Los Angeles Club, at Western and Wilshire, for a cocktail party being given by L.A.-based Allianz Insurance Services for its brokers and re-insurers. There, he had more drinks.

By 7:30 p.m., when the party was breaking up, Masoner was, associates observed, extremely intoxicated--”leaning to one side” in his chair, “wobbly” on his feet and “staring blankly” into space.

The decision was made to drive him home.

As Daniel W. Monnin, a vice president of Neal Lloyd’s parent company in Chicago, has now testified at the request of Allianz employee Linda Scully, he and insurance executive Thomas J. Barber teamed to take Masoner home from the party.

It turned out to be a 90-minute trip from Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard to Masoner’s house at the end of a private drive off Broadlawn above Cahuenga Boulevard. Masoner could, or would not, give them clear directions; they made one gas station stop to look at a map and then, at Masoner’s suggestion, pulled into an Arby’s for coffee.

Several times, Monnin said, Masoner told him that “he did not want me to drive him home . . . he said he was living with someone” and did not want his roommate to see him in that condition. After the coffee stop, he said, Masoner seemed slightly more alert but “was still weaving somewhat.”

It was in the split second after Monnin drove Masoner’s car into the cul-de-sac, with Masoner in the passenger seat and Barber following in his car, that James Masoner made the decision he will spend the rest of his life regretting.

Masoner and Monnin got out of Monnin’s car and walked back to Barber’s car, alongside which the three men exchanged a brief goodnight. The keys had been left in Masoner’s car. Suddenly, Masoner walked back to his car and climbed into the driver’s seat. Where was he going? He says he was going home, that he was headed up his driveway. “I at no time intended to go down the hill,” he swears--the car simply accelerated and took him with it.

As Monnin and Barber watched in disbelief, the Camaro sped out of the cul-de-sac and headed downhill and out of sight. Barber testified in court: “I wanted to go after him. The condition he was in, I was concerned he might be in an accident.”

He and Monnin drove a few hundred yards down the hill, he said, and then “I heard a thud” from below. “I stopped . . . I had a funny feeling.” Looking to his left, he saw the Shaner house with its missing wall, heard someone yelling inside and “we realized the car had gone into the house.”

They were neighbors, yet they never met. Tim Shaner does not remember having seen Masoner until that terrible night in March when, awakened by the thud, he sat up in bed and found himself “looking straight at him. I thought it was a dream. I thought it was an airplane and the pilot was sitting there. The idea of a car in my bedroom was beyond comprehension.”

The only light was from a street lamp shining through a gaping hole in a wall and, Shaner said, “He looked like a ghost, the eeriest thing I’ve ever seen. The dust was so thick. . . .” And the noise was deafening, the Camaro trapped but still accelerating.

From the adjacent bedroom, Shaner heard his wife’s screams--”Where’s Jessie? Where’s Jessie?” He remembered that his daughter had been sitting on the couch but now, he could see, “there was no couch. There was no den . . . just a gaping hole.”

He made his way through the debris to Barbara and, assured that she was on her feet, to the kitchen, where he called the 911 emergency number. He switched off the television set, which lay on its side, blaring.

From the master bedroom, he heard the cries of Morgan, his infant son and, climbing over the hood of the Camaro, he found the baby lying on his stomach in his bassinet, covered with plaster and dust. The car, crashing through the bedroom, had pushed a heavy dresser against the baby’s bassinet, a barrier that created a safe space about six inches wide which prevented him from being crushed.

The Shaners would never see Jessica again. Fearing the collapse of the house, firemen arriving at the scene refused to allow them to go back inside to search. About 30 minutes after the accident, paramedic Gregory Stanton, having monitored Jessica’s body for signs of life, came outside where they waited. There was no need to say anything. “I could tell by looking at his eyes. . . .” Tim Shaner said.

When the fragments and splinters of furniture, the shards of glass and chunks of plaster had been cleared away, only a capful of blood was visible on the floor.

During the trial, at which Masoner did not testify, defense attorney Thomas Byrne depicted his client as the victim of a “runaway car.” The jury heard hours of contradictory testimony from experts for both the defense and the prosecution as to whether a malfunction before the crash could have caused the Camaro’s accelerator pedal to jam and send the vehicle out of control, racing downhill.

Masoner, seated alongside Byrne, kept his head down, making notes on a yellow legal pad, only rarely looking toward the jurors’ box. At that time he was a free man, out on $50,000 bail. He was also a frightened man; his hand, offered in a handshake, was icy cold.

In an attempt to prove its case, the defense even wheeled in as an exhibit the front end of another Camaro. The jurors were shown charts and graphs and a video. They heard detailed testimony about cables and taillight filaments and skid marks.

But in the end the six men and six women, all of whom had been been carefully quizzed during jury selection about possible membership in Mothers Against Drunk Driving and about whether they believed a drunk driver who kills could be guilty of murder, found the “runaway car” issue largely irrelevant.

They focused instead on Masoner’s prior conviction (in May, 1982) for driving under the influence of alcohol, the fact that as a result of that incident, he had attended a mandatory rehab program that stressed the dangers of drinking and driving. And they believed that, although Masoner’s blood alcohol count was still .23 several hours after the accident that killed Jessica Shaner (legally drunk is .10), he was not so drunk that he did not know better than to drive.

As Deputy Dist. Atty. John Spillane, the chief prosecutor, summarized it later: “They just decided the crime occurred at the top of the hill,” at that moment when Masoner, having been delivered home safely from the Allianz party, climbed into his car and took off.

On Friday, Dec. 4, after the jury returned its verdict, Judge Florence Pickard ordered Masoner jailed and he was led, handcuffed, from the courtroom.

Today he is a badge number at county jail, another inmate in standard-issue blues. A blue band on his left wrist brands him as a potential suicide. But, he says, he is not suicidal--his jailers made their assessment on the basis of statements he made at Van Nuys police station the night of the accident--and recently he was moved from the psychiatric ward to a four-man cell. “I suppose I’m in with murderers, he said,” consciously separating his crime from theirs.

In a jail interview earlier this week, he spoke of his “devastation”--a word he used again and again in talking about the accident. “Right now,” he said, “my mouth is dry and I have the shakes, just thinking about it.”

But, asked how he can live with the knowledge that he killed a 4-year-old child, he refuses to acknowledge that, replying quickly: “I am convinced it was an accident, and I didn’t kill anybody.”

He is outraged by what he sees as Spillane’s depiction of him during the trial as a callous man whose mind was focused after the arrest only on when he could get his car back “so I could go and kill again.”

“The car ran away from me,” he insists. “It just accelerated out of control.”

Fingering several days’ stubble on his chin, he recalled all he said he could about that night: “The engine roaring, a bang. And then I lost consciousness,” coming to to be led outside to an ambulance. (His only injury was a superficial facial cut.)

He told of his “total shock,” later, on being informed by police that there was a death.

It was an unmemorable life that took Masoner down the path to a murder conviction. Arroyo High School in San Gabriel, class of ’58. Four years in the Army. Community college and, in 1968, graduation from Cal State L.A. and a job with Pacific Mutual Life Insurance Co.

A rather slight man, beginning to bald, he tells of a mid-life career crisis when another insurance company for which he was working went under. But, last January, Neal Lloyd had hired him at a “more than average” salary for “a job I thought fit my abilities. Everything was great, maybe too great. Then I had the rug pulled out.”

The murder conviction was, he said, a “total shock. I was, unfortunately, optimistic. I expected at the most the alternative sentence (gross vehicular manslaughter, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in state prison). I even thought there was a chance of not guilty” on the two most serious counts.

No, he does not believe justice was done--”not at all. I have only had one traffic ticket in 14 years. I thought I was a fairly upstanding citizen.” He believes he was made an example of, “most definitely . . . I think I was a bit singled out.”

In seeking a second-degree murder conviction, Dist. Atty. Ira Reiner vowed his office intends to review every killing resulting from an alcohol-related crash. In Masoner’s case, he said, he was influenced by the prior DUI conviction, for which Masoner was placed on three years’ probation. Since the Supreme Court ruled in 1981 that second-degree murder charges were allowable in these cases, there have been eight convictions in Los Angeles County, some now pending on appeal, and nine other cases carrying those charges now in the system.

Masoner takes heart, he says, from letters of support, and from the support of family, friends, former neighbors (who recall him as a quiet man who kept largely to himself) and co-workers.

After the accident, Masoner sold the house at 3717 Broadlawn, began psychotherapy and moved to Palm Desert, needing “to get out” of the city. He has been on unpaid administrative leave from his job, pending the outcome of the trial.

Again, the word “killing” is introduced into the conversation and again Masoner flinches. “It’s semantics,” he says, “but I think there’s a tremendous difference between manslaughter and killing. I didn’t kill anybody intentionally. There was no malice aforethought. I did not do that.”

Still, he cannot dismiss the reality: Jessica Shaner died and he caused her death.

And the Shaners--”I would imagine they feel pretty poorly toward me,” Masoner said, “but I would hope they realize it was an accident,” that he too is “something of a victim.”

It isn’t, he hastened to add, that he ever forgets “who the real sympathies should be directed to.” Still, he said: “My fervent hope is that they would look at me as not an ogre, a terrible person.” “Hopefully,” he said, “forgiveness will come” in time.

Soon after the accident, he said, he attempted through the Shaners’ attorney to send his condolences, but the gesture was rejected as inappropriate. He doesn’t expect that they will want to sit down with him “for coffee or anything” but “my mental healing will come in time. I hope theirs will too.”

His life had always been work-centered. “I was a little too old to be a yuppie,” he said, “but I was always trying to balance a lot of balls. It was all go-go.” If he gets another chance, “Money won’t be very important.”

Byrne said he will appeal the verdict--”this one could go all the way” through the system. At sentencing he will ask that Masoner be given probation on the murder conviction and be sentenced on the felony manslaughter count. But whatever, Byrne knows: “He is going to do time.”

Masoner is also a defendant in a civil suit brought by the Shaners. In 14 years, his Broadlawn house had increased substantially in value and proceeds from its sale, in mid-June, are covering his legal expenses. His insurance took care of a $36,000 reconstruction of the Shaner house to put it in shape to go on the market. (As yet, there has been no buyer.)

If there was a drinking problem, he says, that is behind him--”I haven’t had a drink of alcohol since March 5. I don’t intend to. That problem will never surface again.”

He is keeping himself psyched up, making plans for when he gets out. “My life is changed forever,” he said. “There’ll be nothing left except what’s inside me. I’ll have to pick up the pieces and go on. Hopefully, I’ll gather the strength to do that.”

Each day, he reminds himself, “Don’t be so hard on yourself. I’ve pretty much got my head on straight now. I couldn’t go around with my head down between my toes for the rest of my life.”

And, he added: “Tom (Byrne) and I have a job ahead of us. He can’t do very much with me sitting down and sobbing in the corner.”

He takes solace in reminding himself that “the people who know me know I’m not a monster.” (On attorneys’ advice, business associates will not talk about him. Linda Scully, of Allianz-San Francisco, who once worked for him for more than two years, would say only that what has happened is “definitely out of character for Jim. He’s a real nice guy.” She then referred the call to the company’s legal department. Hank Haldeman, chief operating officer for Neal Lloyd West, would say only: “On advice of attorneys, I cannot talk to the press at this time.”)

James Masoner and Barbara and Tim Shaner, though they sat in the same courtroom, have yet to exchange a word.

Masoner would like them to know that he is sorry, terribly sorry. He speaks of his “overwhelming feeling of devastation” for the family. “The way the system works,” he said, “it’s impossible to grab somebody and put your arms around them. It doesn’t mean that’s not what I feel.”

Tim Shaner, his chin set, said firmly: “It was not an accident. It was a crime. It may not have been premeditated but a murder has occurred.”

They had decided to tell their story because they want the message to get out--drinking and driving and office parties don’t mix. And, Tim Shaner added: “My will to do something for my daughter is so strong. We’ve been damaged so greatly as a family.”

“This time,” he said, “it was my daughter. It may be someone else’s next time . . . I don’t want someone else to go through this, especially a child.”

What do they feel toward Jim Masoner? Barbara answers: “A lot of anger.” Tim adds: “If she had fangs and claws, I think she’d rip him apart.”

Justice has been served, they believe. “Anything less (than a murder conviction),” she said, “and I don’t know how I could have dealt with it.” Still, she knows, “whatever justice is served cannot bring my daughter back.”

They have moved to Newhall where, with a VA loan, they were able to buy a tract home for about $130,000. It suits their purposes perfectly, a place where they might find peace and quiet and start over again among neighbors who knew nothing of their tragedy.

On a recent afternoon, in the living room of the new house, Barbara spoke of a “deep sadness, a sadness that I never knew a human being could feel, a very lost, lonely feeling. You wonder if you will ever feel normal again, if you will ever feel happy again.”

She is thin and drawn. “A lot of things I used to enjoy I don’t enjoy anymore,” she explains, “and eating is one of them. I eat and I feel sick.”

That they are alive is a miracle--Barbara just happened to be standing two feet outside the path the car took as it ripped through the room. Barbara escaped with foot lacerations from flying glass. Tim was not injured.

Even so, it is hard to think in terms of miracles. Except for the life of Morgan, their baby. The pain of their loss is still too great. “I feel absorbed by it,” Barbara, 35, said. “It takes all my energy. There’s nothing left over for anyone else. It’s all-consuming.”

She is asked about her marriage and she says: “There is no marriage now. We really don’t have a family. We work hard at pretending, for Morgan’s sake--he needs a chance--but, for the most part, it is a relationship of ‘survival.’ ”

“Even with counseling,” Tim said, “we don’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.” They have sold, discarded or given away most of the furniture that could be salvaged from the Broadlawn house; anything else that would remind them of Jessica has been stored in the attic, out of sight.

Morgan’s toys are heaped in a corner of the living room. He is an outgoing, engaging child. “If it wasn’t for him,” Barbara said, “I don’t know if I’d have any will to be here.” Yet, as he gets older, there is the pain of seeing in him so many of Jessica’s traits.

Tim has gone back to work after having “a kind of collapse” and taking a month’s leave of absence. Once, he was career-driven. Now, he said: “They tell me at work, ‘you’ve lost it.’ I used to have a reputation as tenacious, goal-oriented. Now I take one day at a time. Tomorrow doesn’t mean anything to me.”

As a supervisor, he has trouble dealing with the everyday problems of others. He wants to say: “I know how upset you are, but I’m destroyed.”

Everyone was at the funeral, all the company’s senior executives. But after that, he said, “They didn’t know how to react. People aren’t trained for this. They don’t know how to deal with an employee who emotionally and mentally can no longer do it.”

After three years on an apparent fast track, he has been removed to “special projects.” He doesn’t kid himself: “I have no future” with the company.

They wonder if the pain will ever ease and they are able to take only small consolation in the fact that the law has dealt firmly with James Masoner. “This guy’s in jail,” Tim said, “and my daughter’s buried.”