Clearing Name of a ‘Good Person’

night last March, Debbra Egeler made a mistake.

Upset after a fight with her boyfriend, Egeler, 33, accepted an offer of a motorcycle ride from a man who was drunk. She was killed in an accident in Huntington Beach when the cyclist struck a van stopped at a traffic signal.

Despite not having the results of Egeler’s blood-alcohol test, police investigators assumed that Egeler was also drunk at the time of the accident and shared that opinion with newspaper reporters. Her mother, Barb Egeler, knew that wasn’t true. And she was angry and embarrassed that the last words written about her daughter portrayed her unfairly.

So armed with a toxicology report from the Orange County coroner’s office that shows Debbra Egeler died with no alcohol or drugs in her system, Barb Egeler is out to clear her daughter’s name.

“I want to protect my daughter’s memory,” said Egeler, who is still unable to hold back tears when she talks about her daughter’s death. “That’s all we have left. A memory and a stack of photographs is all you have left.”

Huntington Beach Police Investigator Brian Davidson, who handled the case, said he doesn’t know why police might have speculated that Debbra Egeler was intoxicated.

“It’s nowhere in the entire (police) report,” Davidson said. “Where we got that, I have no idea. Maybe between (the reporters) and our department, there was some kind of mix-up.”

Debbra’s death has been especially difficult for Egeler, because they were a mother-daughter team.

Five years ago, Barb and Debbra sold the beauty shop they owned in Michigan and moved to Orange County where Barb’s other daughter had settled. Barb and Debbra shared a home in Anaheim and worked side by side in the same Huntington Beach hair salon. Debbra never married, although she loved children and decorated her beauty shop station with stuffed animals to amuse her pint-sized clients, Barb Egeler said.

“She was a beautiful girl. She was such a good person,” Egeler said. “If she hadn’t been my daughter, she would have been my dearest friend.”

After the accident, Barb Egeler joined Mothers Against Drunk Driving. She attended courtroom proceedings for the motorcycle driver, Mark Byres of Huntington Beach, who was charged with manslaughter while under the influence of alcohol.

Byres, 31, who sustained only a broken ankle in the accident, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to a year in jail for the felony offense. At the sentencing hearing, Barb Egeler said she took the witness stand and gave Byres a piece of her mind.

“He knew he had been drinking all day,” Egeler said of Byres, whose blood-alcohol level was nearly twice the legal limit at the time of the accident, according to police. “My feeling is he killed her, and she didn’t even know what was going on.”

She has filed a civil lawsuit against Byres, seeking reimbursement for the cost of Debbra’s funeral.

Egeler knows the holidays are going to be difficult. She said that at Thanksgiving, she and her other daughter, Pam, couldn’t take their eyes off the chair in which Debbra should have been sitting.

“So many people drink and drive,” Barb Egeler said. “So many people just don’t think. It’s that same old attitude that it’s not going to happen to me. When that phone rang at quarter to 12 that night . . . believe me, it can happen to you.”