O.C. Drunk Driver Jailed--for 19th Time

David Edwin Wilson may be Orange County’s most dangerous driver, but he was still on the road last week until a sharp-eyed fingerprint technician finally tracked him down.

The 41-year-old Westminster tree-trimmer has been arrested for drunk driving 19 times under five different aliases, his tangled court records show. Wilson has been fined, ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous, had both real and fake driver’s licenses revoked, and spent more than two years in Orange County Jail, records show.

All, apparently, to no avail. In a interview last week in Orange County Jail, where Wilson is being held on $100,000 bail after his arrest on a 12-count felony warrant, Wilson said he knows he is an alcoholic but continues to drive because he needs his truck to work.

“When I know I’m drinking too much, I don’t get in my vehicle,” he said. “But when I black out, I have no idea.”

Wilson said he does not remember whether he broadsided another driver in a hit-and-run accident in June, as police allege. He does remember waking up in jail unsure what name he had given to police. “Every one of the drunk drivings I’ve had has been a blackout,” Wilson said. “I don’t remember any of them.”

California has enacted a host of tougher drunk-driving laws since 1982, most of them aimed at making sure that first offenders do not transgress again.

Among recent changes, the legal blood-alcohol level has been lowered from 0.10 to 0.08. A four-time offender may be charged with a felony, and police may impound the cars of those driving with a suspended license. As of July 1, drunk drivers may also have their licenses confiscated on the spot.

Yet a small but dangerous population of hard-core recidivists like Wilson continue to drive drunk. And authorities say it is virtually impossible to stop them.

“There’s just of few of those out there, but they’re walking time bombs,” said Westminster Police Sgt. C. Russ Miller, who has encountered Wilson. “Even if you give them 30 days, it does absolutely no good.”

A Department of Motor Vehicle study found that at least 75% of Californians whose licenses had been suspended or revoked continued to drive anyway, and 2.5% of drunk drivers give police false names, said Cliff Helander, DMV director of research.

Nevertheless, Helander said, license revocation is effective in preventing accidents. “Even though they continue to drive, they drive less and they drive more carefully, because it becomes a feat for them to drive and not get caught.”

Helander said Wilson’s case is one of the most extreme on record.

“That’s one of the worst cases I’ve ever heard of,” Helander said, noting that he had heard unconfirmed tales of an Oakland man with 33 drunk-driving arrests. “I can say with a good deal of certainty that there aren’t many people like this person.”

Westminster police and prosecutors said Wilson had managed to slip through the system by a combination of skillful deceit and foul-ups in the criminal records system.

Among the problems, said Westminster Police Lt. Richard Main, is that the state no longer records misdemeanor offenses, including drunk driving, on the central criminal records computers. Further complicating matters, Wilson’s first set of fingerprints were filed under an alias, making it difficult to keep his records straight, authorities said.

Orange County Deputy Dist. Atty. Nina Brice and John Robinson, the county’s chief deputy probation officer of field services, each declined to discuss the details of the Wilson case last week. Robinson, citing state statutes that forbid disclosure of criminal record information, said he could not confirm or deny that Wilson had ever been under the supervision of the County Probation Department.

Wilson’s records in Municipal Court in Westminster consist of at least seven tattered, confusing, cross-referenced manila files that contain warrants, citations, charges and DMV records dating back to his first arrest in 1978. In an interview, Wilson said he did use five aliases, including the names and driver’s license numbers of two of his brothers. “They’re really mad at me,” he said.

Wilson said he had also served at least one jail sentence under another fake name, Eugene Edward Burns. Eventually, he said, police began to recognize him by his aliases, and would book him under those names even when he gave them his real one. Nevertheless, he said, police would usually release him once he sobered up.

“They knew who I was,” Wilson said. “I don’t know why they let me out. . . . They just let me go . . . and I wasn’t going to say anything.”

In fact, the Wilson case was finally unraveled only because Richard J. Howie, an 18-year veteran fingerprint man at the Westminster Police Department, noticed an odd whorl on a set of prints back in July.

Howie, a confessed workaholic, “remembers fingerprints the way other people remember faces,” according to his boss, and once identified a notorious rapist by remembering a tiny scar on one of his fingers.

About three times a week, Howie is called over to the courthouse and asked to fingerprint people who claim to have been misidentified or falsely arrested.

On July 19, Howie was asked to “roll prints” on a man who insisted that although his name was on a court summons, he had not been arrested for drunk driving. The man turned out of the one of Wilson’s brothers, and indeed, his fingerprints did not match the alleged drunk driver’s.

But when Howie took a closer look at the original prints, he realized that he had seen them before.

Howie said he spent hours sleuthing in his fingerprint files, as well as county, state and DMV fingerprint files--a search usually conducted only on suspects in crimes far more serious than drunk driving. Finally, Howie said, he connected Wilson to the aliases, and concluded, “If I knew he was on the street, I would not go driving. Period.”

“The strange thing is every time he got arrested, he showed up (in court) and got fined and all that, and nobody ever picked up on who he was,” Howie said.

On Aug. 22, Wilson was charged with 12 counts, including felony drunk driving, driving in an unregistered car, driving on a revoked license, leaving the scene of an accident and giving a false name to police officers. A $50,000 warrant was issued for his arrest, an unprecedented amount for a drunk driver, authorities said.

“We’re very eager to find him, obviously,” said prosecutor Brice, who prepared the charges, on the day before Wilson was arrested. “He’s a potential killer, just like the Night Stalker.”

Police and prosecutors said Wilson’s blood-alcohol levels had been measured at 0.28--more than three times the legal limit.

“Not only can he drive, but he’s able to lie about his name and pull it off. . . . “ said Sgt. Miller. “A normal person could not stand.”

On Wednesday, an Orange police officer who recognized Wilson from the County Jail spotted him, sober but behind the wheel. At his arraignment Friday, Wilson pleaded not guilty and Municipal Judge William L. Mock set bail at $100,000.

Now it is up to the courts to straighten out Wilson’s tangled past. Court records show he was sentenced to jail twice, for six months in 1984 and 18 months in 1987. Wilson, however, said he has served a total of five years in Orange County Jail, including 45 days for receiving stolen property, a charge which does not appear in his court files.

Wilson said he could not remember exactly how many times he has been arrested, or how many times he’s been sent to jail. He said he has tried to stop drinking.

“I didn’t drive for almost three months after I got out last summer,” said Wilson, speaking into the telephone at the visiting room of the Orange County Jail. “Then I had one beer. . . .”

Wilson insisted that he had asked repeatedly for treatment for his alcoholism while in prison, and had once been accepted into a program at the Roque Center, but a judge refused him admission. That and other details of the case could not be verified last week, but authorities said alcohol offenders are routinely required to complete drunk driving education programs or show proof of attendance at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

Jail officials said AA meetings are held three times a week in jail and all inmates are welcome. Wilson said he had accompanied friends to a few AA meetings.

“It was OK, but I never really went enough to get into it,” he said.

Through the glass that separates inmates from visitors, Wilson’s blue eyes appeared clear under a mass of long brown hair and a bushy beard, but the hand that held the telephone trembled.

“When I’m in here, I really don’t think about (drinking) at all,” he added. “I have the shakes and everything, but I’ve had the shakes for years.

“If I ever get out of jail again, all I want to do is get out of this state and go somewhere it’s wilderness, and I don’t ever have to drive again,” he said.

A SNAPSHOT OF HABITUAL DRUNK DRIVERS REPEAT OFFENDERS

Despite harsher penalties, recidivism among drunk drivers remains high. Department of Motor Vehicle studies have found that roughly 15% to 20% of those convicted of driving while intoxicated will be arrested again within one year, and 40% will be arrested again within four years.

MULTIPLE CONVICTIONS

In 1989, about 250,000 Californians were convicted of driving while intoxicated. Of those, roughly 53,000 were second offenders, 18,000 were third offenders and 8,000, or 3%, had at least four previous convictions.

FALSE NAMES

About 2.5% of those arrested for driving while intoxicated give police false names or have more than one driver’s license, a 1987 DMV study showed. Some drivers deliberately do not carry identification and give police the driver’s license numbers of friends, relatives or strangers. If the description matches, and unless the fingerprints are on file locally, the offender is likely to be released before police know his true identity.

LOW DETECTION RATE

Statistically, drunk drivers are likely to be behind the wheel drunk many times between arrests. The DMV estimates that most violators must drive drunk from 200 to 2,000 times before they are caught.

LAW ENFORCEMENT RESPONSE

The DMV is working on a new system that would encode data about each driver--including a physical description and a thumbprint--on a digital strip on each driver’s license. This would be a boon both to law enforcement and to merchants plagued by credit card fraud, DMV research director Cliff Helander said.

Source: Police departments, DMV