Driver in Car Crash Faces Attempted Murder Trial

Carlos Campos Olivarez was ordered Monday to stand trial on charges that he tried to kill his girlfriend by crashing his car in rush-hour traffic on the Simi Valley Freeway, allegedly because she continued to smoke after a cancer operation.

During a 2-day preliminary hearing in San Fernando Municipal Court, Olivarez’s girlfriend, Jeanette L. Canon, testified that Olivarez beat her and deliberately abandoned control of the speeding car during a fight about her continued smoking after an operation for thyroid cancer.

After the surgery, “the doctor suggested I quit smoking,” she said.

“But I’d been very nervous and started smoking again.”

However, Los Angeles police Detective John Birrer, who took Olivarez’s statement two days after the incident, said Olivarez told him that Canon blew up at him Aug. 6 because he free-based cocaine. The detective quoted Olivarez as saying he tried to kill Canon and himself because he was “tired of her complaining” about his drug habit.

Olivarez pleaded not guilty Monday to charges of attempted murder, corporal injury and robbery. He is accused of trying to steal a getaway car from a Granada Hills neighborhood after the crash.

Moved Out

Canon said an argument five weeks before the crash prompted Olivarez to move out of her Glendale apartment after living there for six years. The afternoon of the crash, she said, they had agreed to discuss their problems during an outing at Disneyland or Magic Mountain.

But they started fighting before they left the apartment, Canon testified, and Olivarez pushed her into the car and hit her. Repeated blows knocked her out several times while they were on the road, she said.

Once she came to in a stranger’s house, she testified. The second or third time she remembered regaining consciousness, it was shortly after 5 p.m. and she was in the back seat of a fast-moving car, headed west on the Simi Valley Freeway near Balboa Boulevard.

“I got up and he was driving very, very fast,” she said.

“I screamed, ‘Oh God, don’t do this.’ And he reached around and hit me again.”

“All I saw in an instant was, he let go of the steering wheel,” she said.

Canon braced herself on the floor of the car’s back seat, she said, where she felt a lurch to the right, a skid and then a thud as they hit another vehicle.

“I felt his hand there,” she said, indicating her neck. “Then I don’t remember a whole lot after that.”

Witnesses said Olivarez was traveling at 70 m.p.h. or more when his car flew across two lanes of traffic and up an embankment, then rolled down into a stopped car.

No others were seriously hurt.

Witnesses said Olivarez ran from his car across the eastbound lanes of traffic--where he tried to convince a motorist to turn his vehicle over to him--and into a residential neighborhood. Several people chased him on foot and in cars, finally stopping him as he allegedly tried to steal Marguerite McFarland’s car.

Car Keys

“He said, ‘Give me the keys to your car, bitch,’ ” McFarland said on the witness stand. “He said if I didn’t give them to him in five seconds, he was going to kill me.”

Canon limped into the courtroom Friday, the right side of her face and forehead covered with purple bruises. She said the injuries were caused by the crash and from being beaten by Olivarez.

Before the hearing, Canon told Deputy Dist. Atty. Susan Bilus that Olivarez had begged her from jail not to testify. She said she was “afraid if he gets out, he will hurt me.”

But when Olivarez appeared, Canon delivered an envelope of money to him, which she said was from his mother. On the witness stand, Canon did not say she was afraid. Olivarez’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Tim Murphy, persuaded Judge Paul I. Metzler to dismiss a charge against Olivarez of intimidating a witness and reduce his bail from $100,000 to $49,900.

Arraignment was set for Sept. 12 in Superior Court.

Murphy said that before then he would seek drug and psychological counseling for Olivarez.