Remembering Regina : Girl’s Death Propels Mother Into Traffic Safety Career

If you get stopped at a Los Angeles County sheriff’s sobriety checkpoint, chances are it will be because Jan Nichols is still grieving for her daughter.

Nichols was a department store manager “living a nice, quiet life” in 1981 when a drag-racing drunk driver smashed into a carload of Bellflower High cheerleaders, fatally injuring 16-year-old Regina, an honors student who dreamed of going to law school and becoming a judge.

It would be five years before Nichols could cry, because “I was afraid that if I did, I’d never stop,” she said.

She did not wait nearly that long, however, to change the direction of her life. Immediately after the funeral, she quit her job, determined to join the legions of mourning relatives who become traffic safety crusaders.

Like many, Nichols, 45, began by channeling her anger into demands for retribution--pushing for tough sentences for the man who killed her daughter, and others like him.

Next came counseling victims and lecturing students about the dangers of drinking and driving. Then, finally, she found her niche: working with cops.

She remembered how the officers comforted her after the accident, and she decided she was in a special position to influence them. “If you have a dead kid,” she explained, “you’re Mother Teresa around here.”

But she did more than hang around a police station and proselytize. Since 1987, she has gotten about $1 million in federal and state traffic safety grants for more than 16 law enforcement agencies in Los Angeles County, money used in part to educate officers about enforcing traffic safety laws that they might otherwise consider low priorities--such as the ones requiring use of seat belts or car seats for toddlers.

Her latest accomplishment was getting the Sheriff’s Department a $500,000 federal grant in October to pay for continued sobriety checkpoints, in which motorists are briefly detained to weed out those considered legally drunk.

Although a number of law enforcement agencies have been operating checkpoints for some time, the Sheriff’s Department had enough resources to conduct only 10 in 1991, Nichols said. As a result of the grant, during the next two years deputies plan to operate at least 216 checkpoints throughout the county. The two-year grant also will pay for radar equipment and educational programs.

Not only has traffic safety became a cause for Nichols, she makes a living at it. As an independent contractor, she is paid for writing and administering the traffic safety grants for police agencies.

“I couldn’t work in a normal job,” Nichols said a decade after her daughter’s death. “Everything else seems meaningless to me except traffic safety.”

Nichols’ ability to work with law enforcement agencies is what makes her different from many other safety activists, said Al Crancer, a director of program development for the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, the source of the $500,000 grant. The federal agency also helped fund two of Nichols’ previous grant proposals.

“We knew we had a winner, that’s why we keep funding her,” Crancer said. “It’s rare for a civilian to work so well with both the police and the community.”

It is not always easy persuading police to get behind traffic safety, Nichols said. Handing out a $20 ticket for not wearing a seat belt lacks the glamour of a high-speed chase or burglary arrest.

But in the Santa Clarita Valley, a Nichols-instigated program to step up education and enforcement of the California seat belt law inspired sheriff’s deputies to write more than 5,000 tickets last year. Just last week, the traffic supervisor there, Sgt. John DiMatteo, credited the citations with contributing to a remarkable safety record--not a single traffic-related death in 1991 on local roads, not including highways policed by the California Highway Patrol.

Police officials who have worked with Nichols say she does not exploit her daughter’s death. “She has so much energy, enthusiasm and charisma, you’d never even know what happened,” said former Capt. Dave Thompson, who retired this week from the Glendale Police Department, which was the beneficiary of one of Nichols’ seat belt grants.

Yet, Nichols admits she is not above a little “honest manipulation” when it comes to getting deputies to zealously enforce the state’s 1986 seat belt law. In a training film she helped develop, photographs of Regina and two other young victims flash by as the song “You Are So Beautiful” plays. Though Regina’s life would not have been spared had she been wearing a seat belt, injuries suffered by four other girls in the car might have been less severe, Nichols said.

“After I do a presentation,” she said, “there’s no one who is not misty-eyed or biting their lips.”

Immediately after her daughter’s death, Nichols buried her grief by volunteering 60 hours a week, talking to teen-agers about the dangers of drunk driving and counseling other grieving parents. In 1985, “drained, with nothing left to give,” she entered group therapy and was finally able to weep. But her obsession did not cease.

During the day, she worked for the nonprofit Greater Los Angeles National Safety Council as an assistant in a program to get employers to educate workers about the pending seat belt law.

But that job only paid about $1,000 a month. To make ends meet, Nichols, who is divorced, began working part time for the state as an undercover traffic school monitor, pretending to be a student while looking for evidence that administrators were taking bribes for issuing completion certificates. It got to the point where “I knew the damn Vehicle Code inside and out. I was such a vigilante,” she said.

Through her work with the National Safety Council, Nichols learned of the availability of state and federal grants for traffic safety projects. She has been helping various law enforcement agencies obtain them since 1987, getting paid $3,000 to $4,500 a month from the grants to set up and manage the programs.