A Tragic Trip : Routine Errand Ends in Death as Woman, Youth on Drugs Collide

A young woman under the influence of LSD ignored warnings from a friend to stop her car and--screaming “This is what was meant to be. Yes, yes, yes”--sped into a Manhattan Beach intersection last Saturday, killing a pregnant woman and her fetus, the friend reportedly told police.

One day after the fatal crash, Deborah Simmons of South Pasadena described to a detective a nightmarish ride that ended when her friend, Heather Tolles, collided with a car driven by Laura Obele, 26, of Manhattan Beach. Obele was due on May 26 to give birth to a baby boy.

Tolles, 19, has been charged with two counts of second-degree murder for the death of Obele and the fetus. The state Penal Code defines the malicious killing of a fetus as murder. She is also charged with driving under the influence of a narcotic and seriously injuring another woman, who was hit as she sat on a bus bench.

The teen-ager from South Pasadena is being held without bail pending her arraignment, set for May 17 in South Bay Municipal Court.

Simmons’ testimony will be crucial in showing that Tolles acted maliciously when she ignored warnings about her reckless driving, said Gilbert Garcetti, head of the district attorney’s office in Torrance. To obtain a second-degree murder conviction, which carries a prison sentence of 15 years to life, prosecutors must show that Tolles acted with malice.

In Simmons’ statement to police, she described repeatedly telling Tolles that she was in no condition to drive and should pull over.

“I started crying and telling her that I didn’t understand why she was doing this,” Simmons is quoted in the report, “because she was going to kill us or somebody else. . . . I was screaming, crying, begging her to stop her car.”

However, Tolles’ attorney, Charles R. English, said his client is guilty of manslaughter, at worst, which carries a maximum 10-year prison term.

“This is a young lady who has no history of drugs or arrests or accidents of any kind,” English said. The defense attorney said prosecutors usually prove malice in vehicular murder cases by showing that the defendant failed to correct a history of irresponsible driving.

Tolles’ parents have declined to speak to the media.

Former teachers at South Pasadena High School said they were at a loss to say what had become of the girl who had competed on the swim team and earned good grades.

“She seemed to be very conscientious and just a good kid,” said one former instructor. “She always seemed to know what she was doing.”

Tolles enrolled at the University of California, San Diego, in 1988, but dropped out this year at the end of the fall quarter, according to a university official. The university declined to release any other information.

Laura Obele’s husband, Mitch, whose life was changed in an instant, described the past week as “hell.”

“We were nesting that day,” Obele recalled, describing how he and his wife had been making preparations for the arrival of their baby.

That morning, Laura Obele bought a crib and filled it with stuffed animals for the boy they planned to name Zachary. Mitch Obele was planting a flower bed Saturday morning in front of the couple’s apartment, just two blocks from the beach.

When he ran low on wood chips, Laura Obele volunteered to pick some up at a local nursery.

But she was late arriving home. Then a helicopter began to hover a few blocks away. Finally, a neighbor told Mitch Obele that a red sports car had been smashed nearby in a traffic accident.

Obele jumped on his bicycle and rode the four blocks to the accident, where he saw his wife’s Mazda RX-7 crumpled to half its normal width. She had already been taken to the hospital.

Obele, a computer consultant who is starting his own software firm, and his wife, an agent for a Los Angeles modeling agency, met at an apartment near the USC campus several years ago. The two USC graduates moved to Manhattan Beach from Phoenix in 1988.

“We wanted to raise our family here,” Obele said, tears welling in his eyes.

Tolles and Simmons had not planned to go to Manhattan Beach that day. Their plan was to attend a Grateful Dead concert at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson. With two young men from South Pasadena, they drove to the concert but found that the show had been oversold and their tickets could not get them inside, police said.

One of the men bought LSD for the group, and he and the two girls took the drug, police said. They drove to Manhattan Beach, where they had an argument and the men went their own way.

Simmons told detectives that she felt confused and frightened on the LSD and told Heather they should take a taxi home.

When Tolles ignored her pleas to pull over, Simmons said she tried to get out of the car several times. Tolles locked the door, held her arm and drove too fast for her to escape, Simmons said, according to the report.

Simmons said that Tolles babbled about a book she had read about “a bunch of people in the ‘60s who I guess drove around in a bus and took acid and did weird things”--an apparent reference to the 1960s counterculture group known as the Merry Pranksters. (In “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test,” author Tom Wolfe wrote about the cross-country travels of the group, which was led by writer Ken Kesey.)

According to the police report, Simmons said Tolles told her not to “listen to the voices. We’ll get away.”

Tolles ran a stop sign and, with a police car in pursuit, sped north on Highland Avenue.

“Right when the accident happened, she was just going, ‘This is what was meant to be. Yes, yes, yes,’ ” Simmons said, according to the report. “And she did not put on her brakes. She was putting on the gas and I was just waiting to die.”

It was 5:20 p.m. Laura Obele was driving east on Manhattan Beach Boulevard.

She was flown by helicopter from the accident scene to county Harbor-UCLA Medical Center. The fetus was pronounced dead at 6:10 p.m. Obele died 4 1/2 hours later.

Tolles and Simmons suffered only scrapes and bruises.

Elena Duarte of Palo Alto, who was sitting on a bus bench at the intersection, was seriously injured as Obele’s car careened onto the sidewalk.

Simmons was arrested for narcotics intoxication and is to appear in court later this month.

Tolles was combative and broke away from police before she was handcuffed and placed in a patrol car, Sgt. Dave Ferguson said. The young woman somehow slipped out of her handcuffs and again struggled with officers, biting one near the armpit, before she was handcuffed again and her feet tied, the police report says.

Police tried to talk to Tolles at the Manhattan Beach Jail late Saturday night, but she asked to speak to an attorney. The next day, Ferguson again questioned Tolles, who said she could not recall anything from 1 p.m. of the day of the accident until she arrived at the hospital.

The Obele family has asked that, in lieu of flowers, donations be made in Laura Obele’s name to the AIDS Hospice Foundation, 1800 N. Argyle Ave., Suite 304, Los Angeles 90028.