Jury Finds DMV Negligent in Giving Blind Man a License

The state Department of Motor Vehicles was negligent when it gave a driver’s license to a legally blind Brea man who later plowed his sports car into three people walking to church, an Orange County jury decided Thursday.

Jurors took only four hours to determine that DMV officials knew that George Edgar Lizarralde, 31, could not drive safely when they gave him a license in 1985--and renewed it five years later.

Lizarralde had been denied a license three times, but the DMV granted his request when he applied a fourth time, even though he failed the vision test.

“I’m very happy,” Deborah Ann Mohr, one of the injured pedestrians, said when the jury’s verdict was announced.

Mohr, a 32-year-old former waitress from Whittier--along with her former fiance and his son--sued the DMV. She said the accident left her with brain damage and a limp, and ended her marriage plans.

A second phase of the civil trial will continue in Orange County Superior Court today with the jury determining how much compensation the state agency should pay to the three pedestrians.

Evan Nossoff, a spokesman for the DMV in Sacramento, declined to discuss the case, but said the agency was “constantly re-evaluating and attempting to weigh public safety as a major factor in issuing licenses to those with physical impairments.”

“We handle 20 million licenses a year and we do the best we can to protect the community,” Nossoff said.

Lizarralde, who receives federal disability payments for a debilitating eye disease, did not want to discuss the case, his father said Thursday.

The accident occurred Aug. 4, 1990, when Lizarralde drove his sports car through a marked pedestrian crosswalk, striking Mohr, her former fiance, Brian Barber, and his son, Dane. The father and son also suffered multiple injuries, and both walk with limps as a result of the accident, according to court papers filed by their attorney.

After the accident, Lizarralde told Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputies that he had stopped to pick up a cassette player that had fallen from a seat. He said he looked up moments later, but he was unable to avoid hitting the pedestrians.

Christopher J. Day, a lawyer for the pedestrians, later discovered that Lizarralde had received disability payments since 1979 because of his eye disease.

During the weeklong trial, Lizarralde’s attorney, Roberta Coughlin, successfully petitioned Superior Court Judge Logan Moore to drop her client as a defendant in the case.

Day blamed the DMV for the accident, contending that Lizarralde never should have been allowed to have a driver’s license.

The jury agreed the DMV was liable, finding that Lizarralde’s “vision deficiencies were a legal cause” of the pedestrians’ injuries.