Local News in Brief : Drunk Driver Gets Jail in Death of Student

A judge sentenced a 56-year-old woman to a year in jail for a 1987 drunk-driving crash that killed an 18-year-old college student from Burbank.

Barbara Alice Fell of La Crescenta pleaded guilty in October to vehicular manslaughter. Fell drove her car across the center line of La Tuna Canyon Road in Sunland, colliding with a motorbike and killing the rider, Ian Grant.

“This is an especially tragic case,” said Deputy Dist. Atty. Lloyd M. Nash. Grant, the youngest of six children, died Sept. 26, 1987, on the weekend of his mother’s birthday, according to a probation officer’s report.

Fell had been drinking at a bar and was driving home when the accident occurred, Nash said. Fell, a clerk for a liquor distribution company, was not hurt, he said.

Van Nuys Superior Court Judge David P. Yaffe sentenced Fell to five years probation, with the first year to be served in County Jail. Yaffe said he did not impose a harsher sentence because of her age and lack of a criminal record. He also ordered Fell to undergo alcohol rehabilitation.

A blood sample taken from Fell shortly after the crash showed a blood-alcohol level of 0.17%, Nash said. The legal standard for drunkenness in California is 0.10%.

Grant, a first-year student at Azusa Pacific University, had hoped to be a doctor specializing in sports medicine, according to the probation report.

His parents, Earl and Marilyn Grant, asked Yaffe for a long sentence. Earl Grant, a Methodist minister and chair of the ministry department of Azusa Pacific University, wrote in a Dec. 19 letter to the court: “The loss of our son has caused immense emotional trauma not only in my wife and me but to each of my five children and their spouses.”