VENTURA : Man in Fatal Crash Pleads Not Guilty

A suspected drunken driver pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder Wednesday in the death of a Bakersfield teen-ager killed during a high-speed police chase last month.

Antonio De La Cruz Morales, 21, of Ventura entered the plea in Ventura County Municipal Court, answering the single murder charge filed in the death of Victoria Lee Gonzales, 16.

The girl was sleeping in the back of a van that was rear-ended by Morales’ pickup truck just before midnight Nov. 20, investigators said. He was fleeing California Highway Patrol officers along the eastbound Santa Paula Freeway north of Ventura at speeds topping 100 m.p.h., they said.

Gonzales died after she was thrown from the van and run over by another vehicle, possibly Morales’ truck, investigators said. Morales and his passenger suffered only scrapes.

Morales remains in Ventura County Jail, where he is being held in lieu of $1 million bail pending a preliminary hearing scheduled for Dec. 16.

He is the fourth person to be charged with murder in an alcohol-related crash in Ventura County since a 1981 state Supreme Court ruling permitted such charges.

The case of Diane Mannes is similar to the Morales case, said his attorney, Deputy Public Defender Richard E. Holly.

Mannes’ murder prosecution in the 1989 drunken-driving deaths of three teen-agers, which ended in a deadlocked jury and dismissal by the judge, has been appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court. The high court has not decided whether to hear the district attorney’s appeal in the case.

“There was no allegation in any of the police reports that there was any intent (by Morales) to kill, but there was this attempt to get away from the police at a very dangerously high speed,” Holly said after Morales’ arraignment. In both cases, he said, prosecutors are making “an attempt to stretch the murder statutes to apply to a situation they were never intended to apply to.”

However, Deputy Dist. Atty. Donald C. Glynn replied that Morales’ behavior--driving at high speed, weaving onto the shoulder and median and nearly hitting other cars--meets the legal standard of implied malice required to support a murder charge.

“This is such egregious conduct that it goes beyond what (a verdict of) manslaughter calls for,” Glynn said.