Accident Puts Teen-Age Skateboarder in Coma : Tragedy: A 19-year-old being pulled by a car falls off his board. He’s not expected to live.

DANA POINT--Joel Christopher Banks longed to be center-stage in the Southern California beach scene.

Despite his parents’ objections, the beach-crazy 19-year-old from Northern California packed up his things two years ago and moved to Laguna Niguel, where he found an apartment with three other young men who shared his unquenchable passion for surfing and skateboarding.

On Wednesday night, however, his surfing ambitions were cut tragically short when he fell off his skateboard while hanging onto the back of his roommate’s moving car and slammed his head onto the asphalt driveway of the Monarch Bay Plaza.

By Thursday, Banks, who was described by friends and relatives as an energetic and happy young man, was near death.

Lying in an intensive-care unit, he had slipped into a coma from a crushed skull and was not expected to live, said his father, Jeff Banks, who anxiously waited at Mission Hospital Regional Medical Center for word of his son’s fate.

If doctors by today cannot find activity in his brain, he will be disconnected from the life-support system, Jeff Banks said.

Once disconnected from the life-support system, Banks is expected to die. He will be taken back to Dublin, a Bay Area town near Oakland, for burial.

“He has big ideas, just like any other young man,” Banks said of his son’s other ambition of becoming an oceanographer in New Zealand. His son is a student at Saddleback College.

“But if they didn’t work out,” Banks continued, “there’s always Salt Creek” Beach, a popular South County surfing spot where he and his son shared the same waves when he came to South County on periodic visits.

When Banks moved to Laguna Niguel, his father said, “it was like losing a friend.”

Graeme E. Swayn, also 19, said he, Banks and their two other roommates were preparing their evening meal Wednesday but needed to go to a supermarket in Monarch Bay Plaza to buy bread and hamburger.

Banks and Swayn jumped on their skateboards and rode about a mile to the store, near the intersection of Crown Valley Parkway and South Coast Highway. Meanwhile, roommate Todd L. Caniglia, 23, followed them in his late-model Toyota Celica.

After purchasing the groceries, the skateboarders asked Caniglia to tow them up a steep driveway leading out of the shopping center. They grabbed onto the trunk of the Celica as the car accelerated to about 20 m.p.h., Swayn said.

A moment later, Swayn noticed a rough cement patch on the asphalt.

“I saw the cement, yelled and jumped off,” Swayn said. “Joel let go a split-second too late.”

The wheels on Banks’ skateboard caught on the patch, knocking him backward to the ground, Swayn said.

“His body got real stiff and he was moaning real loud,” Swayn said. “I thought he was hurt just a little, but when I got there, the back of his head was all bloody.”

Orange County Sheriff’s Department spokesman Richard J. Olson said that no one has been charged in the 8:06 p.m. accident but that an investigation is ongoing.

Although no records are available on the number of skateboard-related accidents in Orange County, sheriff’s officials said that as summer approaches, the number of skateboarders who get hurt is bound to rise.

With the demise of skateboard parks because of high insurance rates, shopping centers are drawing an increasing number of skateboarders who intermingle dangerously with pedestrians and motorists while they plunge headlong off stairways and slide down metal handrails on their colorful boards, Lt. George Johnson said.

“We get a steady barrage of calls from merchants,” Johnson said. “You don’t have to look far to see kids riding around in those areas (shopping centers) doing damage and scaring people to death.”

Indeed, one Monarch Bay Plaza flower stand operator said that bothersome skateboarders, most of whom are teen-agers, constantly crisscross the busy parking lot after school and on sunny weekends.

“They do a lot of skateboarding down that hill,” the woman said, gesturing toward the steep driveway. “I’m usually here on Fridays and Saturdays, and when they come, I chase them away. They come up here (near the theater) on the sidewalks. It’s really risky.”

Linda Danylyshyn, who works in an office nearby, said: “I’ve chased kids out of the parking lot on skateboards because they’re not allowed in here. Most of the time, they’re not going to get hurt, but things can happen.”

Johnson said that in Mission Viejo alone, the vast majority of its estimated 17,000 teen-agers own skateboards, a more popular form of transportation than bicycling.

And although Orange County and many cities have restrictive skateboard laws, there are not enough officers to enforce them, Johnson said.

For instance, the deputy continued, it is against the county’s skateboard law to ride down a public street.

“We probably will never put a stop to it,” Johnson said. “You have got to be there at the time ( of a violation).”

But David Swift, associate editor of the Oceanside-based magazine Transworld Skateboarding, said serious accidents involving skateboards are extremely rare. Most of the opposition to the sport comes from people who wrongly believe that skateboarders purposely try to scare pedestrians, he said.

“They (pedestrians) hear a skateboard and they freeze up,” said Swift, a professional skateboarder. “It is definitely not one of the more dangerous sports. There are tons more people out there paralyzed from football injuries. There is definitely a lot of skateboard paranoia.”

Swift said that rather than complain, merchants and city officials should set up more professional skateboard parks, where riders could perform in a controlled environment.

“These kids need a place to skate,” Swift said, adding that it is a healthy sport that keeps “kids off the street. People complain, but they don’t do anything about it.”

Swayn said that Banks is an accomplished skateboarder who never got in a serious accident before. He attributed the accident to fate.

“We go skateboarding all over Salt Creek all the time,” Swayn said. “He was a good skateboarder. I can’t believe he lost it.”

Times staff writer Wendy Paulson contributed to this report.