Angel of mercy? Or cold-blooded killer? At 31, Dr. Ronald Allen found himself . . . : On the Road to Tragedy

Sundays are quiet on Santiago Canyon Road, especially at sundown. On the two-lane highway winding through the remote yellow-green hills, a shiny blue car swerved now and again over the line.

The few oncoming vehicles darted onto the shoulder as the car roared by. “It looked to me like he was doing it on purpose,” says a driver who narrowly dodged a head-on crash on the Orange County road.

Behind the wheel, say investigators, was an uncorked bottle of red wine and Dr. Ronald Joseph Allen, a young, struggling physician from Laguna Beach who was doting on his AIDS patients but neglecting the dangerous direction his own life was taking. Financial worries were mounting; six weeks earlier he had downed prescription pills and rammed three parked cars, telling police he wanted to kill himself.

He had promised friends he would seek help for his drinking and had attended an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. But that was before the phone call earlier this day, July 11, telling him his father had died suddenly.

Allen’s car pulled into the wrong lane, and this time there was no chance for the oncoming car to evade it. Mark and Noreen Minzey were taken to the morgue. Their 11-year-old daughter was taken to the intensive care ward. And Allen, with minor injuries, was taken to jail. The prosecution says that Allen, 31, was so reckless, he will be tried for murder.

Look at Allen from different angles and he changes like a kaleidoscope.

His patients say he’s an angel of mercy. The victims’ survivors say he’s a killer.

His friends say he needs pity and help. The prosecutor says he needs to go to prison.

His high school pals say he was sober and smart. He says he was high on a combination of drugs and alcohol when his car crashed into the Minzeys, but the deaths might have been prevented if authorities or friends had stepped in to stop him.

“Who is he? What does he know about the effects of drugs and alcohol?” says Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Molko. “The answer is, ‘He’s a physician,’ and who would know better than a physician?”

Old friends back home in Illinois heard the news and were shocked.

He was the middle child and only son of a well-to-do couple in well-to-do Geneva, a town of 10,000 that is glad it’s 30 miles from Chicago. A teen-ager found with drugs is still news here.

“He was a straight arrow, and I’m sure he wasn’t into drugs,” says high school classmate Michael Bruder. “In the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, we did not have drug problems at the high school. There might have been a little weekend drinking, but that was the extent of it.”

Allen says he dabbled with marijuana while at college, never experimenting with “street drugs.”

Named after his father, a marketing manager for a tool manufacturer, Allen cruised through high school and was voted “most intellectual” by his graduating class.

“Ron kept to himself and studied a lot but wasn’t considered a bookworm,” Bruder says. Allen joined musical groups, telling friends he wanted to become a professional actor and singer, performed in school shows, became fluent in French, held student government offices, made the honor roll and was named an Illinois state scholar. His comment in his senior yearbook, facetiously bequesting “big words to the sesquipedalian model of efficiency,” hints that he enjoyed his status as campus intellectual.

Allen, who gave a jail interview last week, says he was extremely close to his father. Friends say the elder Allen diverted his son toward medicine and footed much of the bill--about $300,000.

But if Ron Allen pined for a lost singing career, it couldn’t have lasted long. By his own description, he “lived well” while in school and during his internship and residence. By the time he had graduated from Northwestern University, then Rush Medical College in 1989, colleagues say he was intense in his desire to practice medicine.

During his residency at Chicago’s Northwestern Memorial Hospital, he was “above average,” “bright” and “dedicated,” says Dr. Murray Levin, one of the physicians who supervised him.

Allen also was very critical of others’ mistakes, Levin says, adding that it was shocking that Allen would have a drinking or drug problem. “There was never any indication that there was any drug use during his residency--none that I ever saw,” he says. “I had a conversation with Ron about a year ago, and he told me about another physician and decried the fact that that doctor acted erratically.”

Betty Ragle, 37, who met Allen during his residency in Chicago and became a close friend when he started frequenting her restaurant, says that he wasn’t abusing alcohol at that time, although “he loved his Chardonnay.” Monopolized by hospital duties, “he didn’t have the time,” she says.

But symptoms of his problems began to surface publicly as soon as he arrived in Orange County.

While still in his residency in December, 1991, Allen signed a $120,000, two-year contract to be assistant medical director in Irvine for a national chain of AIDS clinics called the Center for Special Immunology, or CSI. The following spring, he moved to Orange County and was really away from home for the first time.

“The apron strings were still not detached,” says a friend. “Here’s someone who grew up around his family until he was 30 years old; then he moves clear across the country. . . . He did not have a close circle of friends; his family had always been there. His father was his best friend. . . . He really was-- is-- a very lonely man.”

Allen says he spoke on the telephone with his father virtually every day--sometimes three times a day.

“I don’t think the umbilical cord was ever broken between California and Illinois,” says a friend. “He never had a life. Do you know what it’s like to spend all of your 20s in the medical school and in the library?”

In April, 1992, during a weekend visit from Chicago to house hunt, Allen rear-ended a car on Crown Valley Parkway in Laguna Niguel and acknowledged he had been drinking, according to reports. Officers report Allen resisted arrest, and friends say Allen wound up spending the night in jail.

While image-conscious professionals typically try to expunge a drunk-driving arrest, Allen apparently ignored it. The following month he failed to appear in court, and a warrant for his arrest was issued May 13, 1992. As is usual in such cases, the warrant lay dormant, waiting for the chance that police might encounter him again.

They did.

Allen received a traffic ticket a month later, but the usual check of files did not reveal the warrant. That July, Allen began working for CSI, but by last October he was gone. CSI says he resigned, but Allen says that after giving notice of his intention to resign, he was fired.

Allen told friends, and later alleged in a lawsuit, that he was outraged over what he believed was a company practice of unnecessary tests, inflated charges and drug company kickbacks.

CSI is sensitive about such statements. In 1988, before a corporate reorganization, its parent company--then known as Professional Care--pleaded guilty to criminal charges in what officials called the largest Medicaid fraud case in New York state history. A CSI spokesman says the company now is run by an entirely different management and board of directors, and considers Professional Care’s transgressions “ancient history.”

Less than a month after Allen left the firm, CSI had filed suit against him, alleging slander. It also charged that Allen violated his contract by trying to lure CSI employees away from the firm, trying to steer CSI patients away from its clinic and surreptitiously copying confidential files.

Allen filed his countersuit, but that did not ease the pressure, says Ragle, who had come west to room with Allen and help him start a private practice. Allen believed he was being blackballed by CSI and told friends he had received death threats, Ragle says.

“The CSI situation became a mission for him,” she says. “I think that he was becoming a little paranoid about it. He made mention to me that he had been threatened. Whether that’s true, I don’t know.”

After leaving CSI, Allen took a job managing a newly opened clinic in Laguna Beach, but it closed after three weeks, Ragle says. He had larger-than-usual debts from medical school, and one of the creditors--his father--was occasionally demanding that he start repaying.

“He didn’t want to give up and go back to Chicago,” Ragle says. “He liked Laguna Beach.” At Ragle’s urging, he made the effort to begin socializing to make himself known after opening an office beside South Coast Medical Center.

It was strictly an AIDS practice, treatment of people whose fatal disease has no cure.

“So many people you know are dying or going to be dead. I’m sure that’s very, very hard on a physician,” says a friend.

But Allen said he wanted to specialize in AIDS because a close friend since childhood had died of it, according to Ragle.

Until five months ago, she says, she was Allen’s almost constant companion--managing his office, dining with him, living rent-free at his ocean-view house in Arch Beach Heights, which he rented for $1,650 a month. She says he seemingly had no life other than working at the clinic, then reading his medical journals until he fell asleep on the sofa.

During that time, she says, he confided in her about many of the details of his life: his bond with his father; occasional friction with his mother, who Ragle claims was less comfortable than her husband about their son’s homosexuality; and his near-obsession with CSI.

“We never really abused drugs when I was living with him,” she says. “I think it was recent. . . . It’s not something that’s been ongoing. I’m sure that he probably did do some. I don’t think he leaned on them. They weren’t recreational drugs; they were prescription.” She says that “whatever he did, he’d become obsessive.” Deciding he was downright chubby at 5-foot-11 and 215 pounds, he decided to lose weight and bought gym equipment for his home, she says. But rather than merely burn off the fat, he became an avid body builder and told her he injected steroids to add muscle bulk. “He is nice looking and very vain,” she adds.

During one period, although allergic to Ragle’s cats, Allen refused to take allergy medication and also refused pain medication for his bad back because he said it made him groggy. At other times, he took Valium, a tranquilizer, and Demerol, a narcotic similar to morphine, to ease a painful knee, she says.

Last February, Allen sent Ragle packing, and she returned to Chicago, she says. According to her, friends and family had convinced him that she was freeloading. “He felt that I had used him,” she says. “His mother was afraid that I was after him for his money. What money?”

Their nonstop togetherness and the stress of treating terminally ill patients also took their toll, she says.

But Allen later apologized and was on the phone to her again July 10, talking and drinking for an hour and a half, telling her about the mess he was in: His father had come to visit on Memorial Day weekend, and they had gone to a restaurant, he reportedly said. There, his father had demanded that he begin repaying the money he’d borrowed, more than $300,000 at 10.5% interest, and an argument had broken out.

His father had never approved of his AIDS practice because it was unprofitable, Allen says. His father had always wanted his own business, Allen adds, and he was trying to fulfill his dreams when he encouraged and financed Allen’s entry into private practice, which was failing financially.

“Here my father has tons of money and he’s here asking me to pay him back when I’m having trouble eating,” Allen says. “I tried to tell my dad how depressed I was, but he just didn’t see it. I think he was trying to fulfill his business dreams at my expense.

“I was ready to declare bankruptcy. . . . I wasn’t meant for business. I hate money. I wanted to practice medicine, and here I was, just a few months out of medical school and I suddenly (discover) it’s all about money. I wanted to get out.”

That, says Allen, was when he decided on suicide.

He told Ragle what had happened the night of the argument, but Laguna Beach police could have told her as well.

A security guard at South Coast Medical Center, where Allen had staff privileges, saw him driving erratically shortly before midnight May 31 and was alarmed enough by his driving to call police. Officers say Allen rammed three parked cars and, when finally stopped, “violently” wrestled with officers.

Once subdued, he told officers “he wanted to die, that he wanted a gun so he could shoot himself,” according to the report. Officers quoted him as saying his wife had died, although Allen has never been married. He had a box of prescription drugs with him that included Halcion, a sleeping pill, and Vicodin, a painkiller, the report said. He told police he was trying to overdose.

Alarmed by Allen’s lapse into semiconsciousness, officers took him back to the hospital. There Allen revived and, according to police, became “loud and boisterous and wanted to fight with the officers.” Police said that the next day Allen confirmed he had tried to kill himself, but over financial difficulties.

Hospital officials suspended Allen from their staff and reported him to state medical authorities. Allen says the hospital released him to his father’s care on the condition that he be taken back to Chicago.

The medical community should have intervened and forced Allen into treatment, says one friend: “The truth is, very few people like to accuse a doctor of abusing drugs or alcohol, and that’s probably how he slipped through the cracks.”

Another friend says he had extracted a promise from Allen to seek treatment for his drug taking and drinking. Allen says he was beginning to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

During their July 10 phone conversation, Allen and Ragle talked a little about patients they had known who died. Then they hung up. Allen went out and, according to his new roommate, didn’t return until the next day.

The first thing he did--about 1 p.m.--was telephone his father. Instead, he learned his father, 62, had just died, apparently of a heart attack. His mother had gone shopping and returned to find the body.

“By trying to kill myself, I think I killed him inside,” Allen said later.

Friends say Allen’s roommate, who had only been living with him three weeks, knew how big a blow the father’s death would be. He tried to remain with Allen, but Allen asked him to leave, declaring, “I can only cry alone.” The roommate, who spoke on the condition he not be further identified, resisted and then left for Allen’s office to cancel the next week’s appointments with patients. But he called Allen hourly to check on him.

Allen eventually appeared at the office and asked the roommate to keep him company over a dinner out. The roommate went home to shower and Allen told him to call when he was ready. The roommate called about 7 p.m., but there was no answer.

At about 7:20 p.m., cars driving along Santiago Canyon Road east of Orange were veering off the road to avoid a fast-moving Chevrolet Lumina plunging in and out of the oncoming lane.

It rammed head-on into a car containing three-fourths of the Minzey family, who were returning to Mission Viejo after the daughter’s softball game. Mark and Noreen Minzey, husband and wife, were killed instantly, officers say. Their daughter, 11-year-old Karie, was battered so badly in the head that hospital authorities listed her in “extremely critical” condition. After surgery, her condition eventually improved to stable but guarded. Two others in the car escaped with less serious injuries.

As Allen was being led into jail, he mumbled an explanation to the group of news media standing by. “My father died,” he said. “I was upset, and my father died.”

Ragle says she has visited Allen in jail. He told her he has been reading the Bible and literature from Alcoholics Anonymous. He is grieving over his father’s death and is worried about his patients, she notes. He said, “ ‘God didn’t want me to die in that crash,’ ” according to Ragle. “ ‘I don’t know why I was spared.’ ” She adds that he believes “the only way he could possibly make it up to these young kids is to continue saving lives.”

The state medical board is considering suspending Allen’s license. Says a board spokeswoman: “We do not want Dr. Allen to continue practicing medicine under any circumstances, even in jail.”

Allen, speaking through a jail intercom, says he finds the chain of events “so hard to believe. I can say the police should have stopped me, I can say a psychiatrist didn’t intervene, I can say my dad didn’t do enough to help me, but in the end I have to blame it on myself. I did it. . . .

“I know I’m going to be spending a long time in prison over this, and I can’t argue with that.”

Times staff writer Rene Lynch reported from Santa Ana; correspondent George Frank reported from Chicago.