Hit-and-Run Accidents Soar to Record Level

Kenny Ly, a cherubic 4-year-old who could count to 100 and recite his ABCs, never saw the speeding blue-green sedan as he stepped off the curb last April onto a quiet San Gabriel side street.

The front bumper of the car ripped Kenny from his mother’s hand, and hurled him 68 feet. The driver sped off, leaving behind only a shattered headlight and a few specks of paint embedded in the boy’s jeans. Kenny was dead.

Since then, detectives have spent dozens of hours staking out the crime scene, searching the neighborhood and even debating whether hypnosis might help Kenny’s parents recall more about the accident.

But as is frequently the case with hit-and-runs--so vexing because they involve chance encounters with fleeing strangers--the officers have come up empty.

The sad death of Kenny and its frustrating aftermath are not unusual. Throughout the state, hit-and-run crashes have reached record levels, far outpacing increases in population and in the number of vehicles on the road.

Authorities blame the rise on a range of factors in California’s social and cultural landscape: soaring insurance rates, an influx of undocumented immigrants who are often fearful of police and, ironically, tougher drunk driving laws that have made jail time a virtual certainty.

Over the last decade, according to the California Highway Patrol, the number of hit-and-runs resulting in death or injury jumped from 17,543 in 1980 to 27,246 in 1989--a 55% leap. Last year, accidents resulted in 38,407 injuries and deaths, a number nearly equal to the population of West Hollywood.

In Orange County, accidents resulting in injury and death increased 57 percent from 1980 to 1989. There were 1,305 incidents in 1980, compared with 2,046 last year.

No portion of the state compares to congested Los Angeles County, which accounts for nearly half of the state’s hit-and-runs. Last year, hit-and-run drivers here caused 158 fatal crashes and 12,022 accidents in which someone was hurt. On average, such drivers hurt or kill 339 people in the county each week.

“Drugs and gangs get a lot more attention, but people are losing a tremendous amount when it comes to hit-and-runs,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Dennis Zine, head of the San Fernando Valley traffic bureau.

He estimates that half of all accidents in the Valley are caused by hit-and-run drivers. “It’s the attitude of, ‘If I don’t get caught, I don’t get caught.’ Society just can’t function that way.”

The dramatic rise in hit-and-runs is partly explained by the fact that there are at least 6 million more cars in California than there were 10 years ago. Traffic is worse and tensions run high. But detectives--along with criminologists, psychiatrists and highway safety experts--believe that a variety of other changes have increased the number of drivers likely to flee the scene of an accident:

With the average auto insurance premium in California above $800, the number of uninsured drivers, particularly in inner-city neighborhoods, has mushroomed over the last decade. Statewide, about one of every five drivers has no coverage, according to a Department of Motor Vehicles estimate.

A huge influx of undocumented immigrants, many of whom are unfamiliar with California traffic laws and fearful of deportation, adds to the number of drivers who do not wait for police to arrive. Those cultural differences are compounded by the fact that in some countries, such as Mexico, drivers may be taken to jail until officers decide who is at fault after a traffic accident.

A large percentage of hit-and-run crashes are caused by drunk drivers. But with tougher laws on the books, there is a greater incentive for them to flee rather than face an almost certain jail term.

Finally, there is a growing sense that large metropolitan areas have simply become meaner and tougher places to live, where survival means getting away with whatever you can.

“The bottom line is that people simply believe that they’re not going to get caught,” said George Felkenes, a professor of criminal justice at the Claremont Graduate School’s Center for Politics and Policy. “They just don’t think that governmental agencies are going to, or can do, anything to punish them.”

They are right. Leaving the scene of an accident is a crime--punishable by as much as four years in state prison if someone is injured or killed. Yet, it is often a crime without punishment because so many of the offenders are never caught.

Although few police departments keep statistics on the number of hit-and-run cases they solve, officers in some cities say that hit-and-runs involving only auto damage are so numerous that as many as 90% go unresolved.

More resources are put into solving fatal hit-and-runs. But there is always a handful of cases that, no matter what detectives do, remain mysteries.

In Anaheim, for instance, police found little more than a gnarled bicycle next to the body of Kenneth Lundie, 66, who was run over last month in the bike lane of Santa Ana Canyon Road as he neared the end of a 200-mile endurance ride.

In Oceanside, CHP investigators said they have no clues about who struck Juan Francisco Camacho, a 20-year-old migrant worker who last month lay bleeding for four days along the side of I-5 before being rescued.

And in the case of young Kenny Ly, San Gabriel police are beginning to doubt that they will ever know who was driving the car that slammed into the preschooler as he headed home from lunch at a Chinese restaurant with his family.

“We’ve basically been all over the place and gotten nowhere,” said San Gabriel Police Capt. David Lawton. “Unfortunately, you reach the point where there’s nothing else you can do except hope that somebody who knows something will be bothered by their conscience.”

Even with five eyewitnesses, including the boy’s parents, officers have only been able to narrow down the description of the car to an aqua or turquoise General Motors four-door model, possibly a Cadillac, built in the late 1970s or early ‘80s.

The investigator assigned to the case, Detective Curtis Gray, has returned many afternoons to the 1500 block of Gladys Avenue, hoping the car will one day show up. Since the accident occurred at 3 p.m. on a residential side street, not a main thoroughfare, Gray’s theory is that the driver might have been familiar with the neighborhood and will pass by again.

Gray also has a DMV computer printout that lists all the four-door General Motors cars registered in San Gabriel and in neighboring communities. But the list includes thousands of names and Gray is not optimistic that it will provide any answers soon.

After the accident, Kenny’s jeans were sent to the Sheriff Department’s crime lab, where scientists were able to scan for flecks of paint that may help determine more precisely the year and model of the vehicle.

Using an instrument known as a “docuspec,” which electronically measures color intensity, technicians can compare the paint left behind by a suspect’s car with standards supplied by auto manufacturers. For example, Cadillac blue and Buick blue are never exactly alike.

The shattered headlight swept up at the accident scene also was sent to the lab, where experts sometimes are able to put broken glass back together like a puzzle. Other comparisons, such as the density of the glass and the degree to which it refracts light, help narrow the number of different models it could have come from.

But Gray said all that information would prove helpful in court only if the car is found. It does not help lead him to the vehicle.

His one hope is that hypnosis might help one of Kenny’s parents more vividly recall the details of the accident. But his supervisor, Capt. Lawton, wants to proceed cautiously in light of a 1982 California Supreme Court ruling that prohibits hypnotized witnesses from later testifying at a trial.

“The way I figure, if we use it and it helps us, then at least we’ve got the guy,” Gray said. “As it stands now, there’s not even enough here for a hunch.”

Not all investigations fail to bear fruit. Armed with a partial description of a car and driver, Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Guy Van Sickle spent eight weeks hunting for the man who ran a red light and killed Jorge Rodelo, 24, as he bicycled across Hawthorne Boulevard on March 24.

Last Wednesday, his efforts paid off when Torrance police arrested a suspect based on information Van Sickle provided about a gold 1972 Pontiac Firebird he had stopped on May 13.

In a particularly bizarre case in January, 1989, CHP officers found their hit-and-run suspect minutes after he allegedly killed a motorcyclist on Pacific Coast Highway--the man showed up naked at the Chart House restaurant in Malibu yelling, “Hail Satan.” The pickup truck allegedly used in the accident was left running in the restaurant parking lot.

“That was a really weird one,” said CHP Officer Mitch Mundahl, who investigated the accident. “Probably one of a kind.”

In an effort to prevent hit-and-runs, police departments have taken a number of different approaches. They include offering traffic safety classes in immigrant communities and forming special task forces to look out for scofflaw drivers.

Such an operation earlier this month in the San Fernando Valley resulted in police impounding 251 cars that had expired registrations or were being driven by people who were unlicensed or uninsured.

“Our approach is to take their cars, inconvenience them and maybe get their attention,” said the LAPD’s Sgt. Zine. “These people don’t want to take any responsibility for their actions.”

That is what torments Su Ping Ly, 34, who still cannot fathom that her only child was snatched from her hands by a driver who never even slowed down.

Maybe someday the police will catch the man, she said. But in the end, it really no longer matters.

“I want nothing from him,” said Ly. “He cannot bring back my son.”

SURGE IN HIT-AND-RUNS

These are the total number of fatal and injury accidents caused by hit-and-run drivers in selected counties for each of the last 10 years:

COUNTY 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 Orange 1,305 1,292 1,250 1,277 1,456 1,563 1,813 Los Angeles 8,028 7,763 7,635 7,849 8,078 9,037 11,162 San Diego 1,119 1,151 1,166 1,189 1,238 1,288 1,588 San Bernardino 480 423 440 489 535 635 881 San Francisco 376 536 466 452 544 657 614 CALIFORNIA 17,543 17,363 16,651 17,347 18,559 20,011 23,904

COUNTY 1987 1988 Orange 1,882 1,998 Los Angeles 11,254 11,687 San Diego 1,652 1,795 San Bernardino 885 932 San Francisco 592 712 CALIFORNIA 24,596 25,892

%CHNG. COUNTY 1989 1980-89 Orange 2,046 +57 Los Angeles 12,180 +52 San Diego 1,885 +68 San Bernardino 1,025 +114 San Francisco 937 +149 CALIFORNIA 27,246 +55

SOURCE: California Highway Patrol