Driver Who Killed 2 Sentenced to 6 Years : Fathers of Victims Ask Judge for Longer, Maximum Prison Term

Richard Harold Wallinger, the South Laguna man whose reckless driving led to a fiery crash on Coast Highway in November that killed two people, was sentenced Wednesday to six years in state prison.

Every seat in the small courtroom of Superior Court Judge Kathleen E. O’Leary was filled during the hearing as friends and relatives of the victims--13-year-old Kelly Sawyer and 38-year-old Lynne Chaney--sat opposite those of Wallinger, who had pleaded guilty to charges of vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol.

The accident occurred as Chaney was driving Kelly home after the girl had been baby-sitting with her two young children. Cocaine and alcohol were detected in Wallinger’s blood following the crash, and several packages of cocaine were later found in his car.

O’Leary was chosen to sentence Wallinger after the first judge scheduled to do so, Myron S. Brown, disqualified himself upon learning that the younger victim’s father was an acquaintance of his.

Brown removed himself after Kelly Sawyer’s father, Art Sawyer, began an emotional address in court urging the judge to sentence Wallinger to the maximum term for his crime.

Sawyer, an attorney, had appeared before Brown many times before, the judge said, and thus he felt he could not be impartial in imposing sentence upon Wallinger.

Before O’Leary passed sentence on the 25-year-old Wallinger, the fathers of the two victims stood before the judge imploring her to give him the longest possible term: 13 years, four months in state prison.

“Basically, people are good,” Sawyer told the judge. “But this particular individual needs a lesson. He needs the maximum possible sentence and he needs it now.”

Bob Gayetty, Chaney’s father, joined Sawyer’s plea, saying of Wallinger: “Maybe he can be rehabilitated after he’s had plenty of time to think about it.”

The prosecutor, Deputy Dist. Atty. Patrick H. Donahue, said Wallinger’s “selfish, self-centered type of life style . . . (should) not be tolerated.”

But the judge imposed a term of six years, the sentence specified by the Legislature when a crime has neither aggravating nor mitigating circumstances that would warrant unusually severe or lenient treatment.

After Sawyer, his sorrowful voice sometimes barely audible, asked O’Leary to give Wallinger “zero consideration, because he gave the members of our families none,” the judge replied that she could not grant his wish.

“As a judge, I have to be careful not to lower myself to (Wallinger’s) standards,” she said.

The six-year sentence was that proposed by Wallinger’s attorney, Mike McDonald, who asked that his client not be “judged on the worst day of his life.”

“He might have been a horrible, bad, bad guy on that night, but he was a good person before and he could be a good person after,” McDonald said.

Wallinger, who sat handcuffed before the judge in an Orange County Jail jump suit, said nothing during the hearing except brief words to his attorney.