The Value of a Life : Family Forgoes Compensation to Pursue Justice in Father’s Slaying by Drunk Driver

For any of dozens of high-powered Los Angeles lawyers it was a routine plea bargain, one that intertwined money and justice so closely that they became difficult to distinguish. It was tailor-made to tempt a person like Gloria Berumen--immigrant, Spanish speaker, widowed mother of four.

Berumen, whose husband was killed by a woman with three prior drunk driving-related convictions, was offered $35,000 last year to forget about pursuing a murder charge against the driver.

She turned it down.

“Of course we could have used the money, but just for her to get off and go free, no,” said Berumen, who was present when a Van Nuys jury returned guilty verdicts in the case last month. “Money is better earned working. That’s what my husband always said. He wouldn’t have done it. We felt we shouldn’t grab at that money.”

The family has paid a price: The oldest son, Tomas, was forced to quit high school and go to work. Daughter Marta went to work as soon as she graduated, abandoning for now any plans for college. The children toil in restaurants--Tomas for as many as 20 hours a day--just as their father had, to support the family.

“Between our three salaries, we get by,” Gloria Berumen said in Spanish during a recent interview at the family’s modest, tidy home on a cul-de-sac in Reseda. “We have enough to pay the rent and put food on the table.”

By showing the courts in Van Nuys that human life and justice don’t always carry a negotiable price tag, the Berumens have set themselves apart from many who pass through Los Angeles County’s court system, raising questions about crime, punishment and restitution.

The proposed deal had come from the driver’s family through a lawyer defending Susan Conkey Rhea, 39, a former debutante who had graduated from the tony, private Marlborough School and later from USC.

Don’t object if prosecutors drop the murder charge, the offer went, and the Berumens would immediately receive the $35,000 that otherwise would be spent on lawyers for the trial. Meanwhile, Rhea would plead guilty to vehicular manslaughter and accept a 10-year prison sentence.

“Justice wasn’t done. Justice is, as best you can, reconciling everyone’s interests--punishing Susan Rhea and helping the family,” said Harland W. Braun, the defense attorney who made the offer.

Instead, he said, all prosecutors did was punish Rhea. “Meanwhile, a family of five is destitute. That isn’t justice,” Braun said.

But Deputy Dist. Atty. Danette Meyers saw matters differently.

“I told Harland he should be ashamed of himself,” she said. “If you were representing one of those highfalutin families from Beverly Hills or Hancock Park, would you sell their father short for $35,000? I can spend that in one afternoon at Bullock’s. Just because this family is poor, you want to shortchange them?”

Meyers’ boss, Head Deputy Dist. Atty. Philip H. Wynn, who oversees the Van Nuys office, also said he was troubled by the monetary offer.

“We have cases all the time where offers are made with restitution,” Wynn said. “But where there’s a death involved and the facts are as these were, I’d say it’s unusual. We wanted to explain everything to the family members and get their feelings on it before we came to any decision.”

The matter came to a climax in the Van Nuys district attorney’s office late last fall. The Berumen family, prosecutors and defense attorney Braun gathered to discuss plea bargaining.

Wynn, however, asked Braun to wait outside. He told the family that his office, which makes the ultimate decision, was uncertain about what they knew and didn’t know about the strength of the murder case.

“I knew they didn’t have much money and this was a significant amount,” Wynn said. “I outlined the case for them, including the defendant’s prior record. They were shocked when they heard about that.”

Jesus, his father’s namesake, now a 17-year-old junior at Reseda High School, was the first family member to speak.

“I personally don’t care about the money,” he recalls saying at the meeting.

“I had my father. I was happy. She [Rhea] took it away and she tried to exchange it with money. When we were at that meeting in the district attorney’s office and they told us about her prior convictions, I thought, ‘My brother’s out there driving. I’m out there driving. Other people are out there driving, and what if she gets out and does it again?’ It’s not right to pay for a life, like that woman thought she could. It’s better she’s in jail where she can’t hurt anyone else.”

The others quickly agreed, the deal dissolved and the case headed toward trial, the murder conviction still far from a sure thing.

For more than a year, this family came to court, knowing they were the underdogs in a difficult criminal case, fearful, as Gloria Berumen said, that someone with access to more money than they could ever imagine would somehow prevail. But the family believes it won justice when a jury returned a second-degree murder conviction against Rhea on July 30. When she is sentenced Sept. 5, she faces 15 years to life in state prison.

A profound sadness still fills the Berumen home. The living room wall is covered with family photographs. Over the hearth hangs a portrait of an uncle Jesus once idolized, who also was killed in an auto accident. The Berumens say they have not accepted any money, except for a check from a credit union savings plan and donations raised by co-workers. They had no life insurance, although Jesus had seen an advertisement on television and was thinking about buying some. A lawyer they hired declined to file a lawsuit, saying that Rhea in fact had no assets, no license and no insurance.

Gloria still dresses in black every day. She always has been quiet and reserved, but her grief seems to have drawn her deeper inside herself. She rarely smiles, and she says that since her husband died, she speaks to no one about it, not even God.

Tomas, the oldest son, continues to feel guilty because he was the one who was supposed to be out on the road that night, picking up his mother at work. His father went instead because Tomas had a cold.

The three oldest children now take turns watching their youngest sibling and helping out with the household bills and chores.

The boy, Uriel, 4, waits patiently for his father to come home, telling his mother in Spanish that his papa is working day and night at a chocolate factory, building a candy castle for him.

But for the vagaries of timing and circumstance, the path of the Berumen family might never have crossed with that of Susan Conkey Rhea.

Two decades ago, Susan Catherine Conkey, as she was then known, was graduating from the exclusive Marlborough School. She was a debutante, studying the rituals of white gloves, curtsies, fluttering eyelashes and dance cards--the catechism of all cotillion-bound young ladies born to money and privilege in Los Angeles’ Hancock Park.

About the same time, 1,200 miles away and a world apart on a ranch in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, Gloria Briceno, at 15 already an admired and accomplished rodeo rider, eloped with Jesus Berumen, a tall, strapping boy she’d known since childhood. He had grown into a handsome young man so filled with boisterous song and laughter that he warmed her heart when he joked that she was tiny enough to hide in his pocket.

Soon after they married, and filled with the spirit of adventure, they came to California, following the seasonal paths worn by Jesus’ father, a migrant farm worker. But, no matter how much Jesus loved the garden and the animals, theirs would not be a rural life, they vowed. They settled in Los Angeles, went to work at better-paying factory and restaurant jobs and quickly had three children. Later, Uriel, an enchanting fourth child, arrived, a bit of a gift, a bit of a surprise.

The first in their families to leave Zacatecas in search of work and opportunity, the Berumens became first-time homeowners by the early 1990s, having worked so many extra shifts at jobs in the Valley that they’d finally saved enough for a down payment on a modest ranch house.

They were grateful that their teenage children had grown up to be studious and hard-working and had not fallen prey to drugs and gangs.

Even as the Berumens continued to build their life and family, Rhea’s was disintegrating as she became swallowed up in a 15-year downward spiral of alcohol, fractured relationships, drunken car wrecks and mental illness.

Court records show these milestones on the road to ruin:

Her defense attorney during the trial, Richard A. Hutton, told the jury that Rhea’s drinking problem began about 15 years ago, about the same time she was graduating from USC. Six years later, at age 29, she was first arrested for drunk driving, refusing to take a breath test. She told police: “My brother is a D.A. I’m not taking anything until I talk to my attorney.”

She pleaded guilty to reckless driving--a disposition known in the courthouse as a “wet reckless”--and was placed on 36 months’ probation.

Almost exactly a year later, she was arrested after crashing into another car and a signpost on the Ventura Freeway. She again refused to be tested, telling the CHP officer: “Save your breath, I’m not taking anything.” She also bragged that she “beat the DUI last time” and would beat it again in court.

She was married while the case was pending. She pleaded no contest, was sentenced to 34 days in jail and was ordered to attend Alcoholics Anonymous meetings.

In 1990, and again in 1992, after Rhea had spent at least one stint in rehab, her young son came to the attention of the Department of Children’s Services, first when she failed to keep appointments for vaccinations and routine medical checkups and later when she locked the toddler out of her house and passed out in an upstairs bedroom. It was just 8 a.m.

Both times, witnesses told social workers they often saw her staggering and intoxicated. She also told doctors in rehab that she was consuming 10 to 15 drinks a day, according to court records.

In October 1993, just past a six-month anniversary of sobriety, Rhea once again fell off the wagon and drove off the road near Lake Tahoe. She told police she had consumed three glasses of wine at a casino nearby, but her blood alcohol level was an astounding 0.27%--more than three times the legal limit. She was sentenced to 15 days in jail and five years’ probation. She also was ordered to install an Interlock device on her car.

In January 1995, she’d been sober nine months when she became depressed and again fell off the wagon after a particularly vicious argument with her husband, according to a transcript of her preliminary hearing. She checked into a rehab facility for two weeks and was treated for depression, according to testimony at her trial.

She checked out Jan. 27. A few days later, on the last minute of Jan. 30, she hit Berumen’s car in a horrifying blur of fire, breaking glass and twisted metal at one of the Valley’s most deadly intersections.

Jesus Berumen, 45, was tired from his job making pizzas at a Woodland Hills restaurant, but he had offered to pick up his wife at the plant where she soldered computer circuits.

He was stopped at the light.

Rhea had barely missed two other cars before slamming into the rear of Berumen’s Ford Tempo, trapping him inside the burning vehicle.

While Berumen screamed and flailed and died, witnesses said, Rhea made no effort to help him. Instead, she peered into a vanity mirror and dabbed at her face.

While her lawyers later would try to apply the best possible spin--that she was wiping glass and blood from her eyes--an off-duty police officer who rushed to the accident scene would swear on the witness stand that she was applying mascara.

In her wrecked car, police found self-help books with titles such as “The Twelve Steps to Happiness,” as well as an angry goodbye letter to her husband, according to testimony at the trial.

“Why do you find it necessary to constantly lie, put me down, etc.? Your immaturity is as chronic as my alcoholism,” it said. “To save my life, I may have to leave you. . . . I always wish you the best, but you have to find the real man inside you.” She greeted the two paramedics who rushed to her side with some of the most insulting profanities they’d ever heard.

“She just didn’t seem to be caring about much of anything,” paramedic Deresa Teller would later recall. “I asked her if she realized that she was just in a car accident. And she said yes, she did. And if she realized that she killed somebody. And she said no. She didn’t even realize--in fact, she didn’t do anything. She just kind of looked dumbfounded.”

Prosecutors in Van Nuys have set up a trust fund for the Berumen family. For information, contact victim-witness advocate Gloria Morin at (818) 374-2400. Donations also can be forwarded to the Berumen Family Trust, P.O. Box 1709, Glendale, CA 91209-1709.