Truth About Consequences

Jan St. Michel started crying almost as soon as she took her place at the microphone in the downtown county courthouse. She showed what looked like a graduation picture of a girl with soft, dark hair.

“This is my baby,” St. Michel said, her voice beginning to break. “And she’ll always be my baby. She was 19 years old.”

Robin St. Michel was headed home from a Fourth of July party when a man left a party of his own. He had drunk a six-pack of beer and was headed out for another when he rammed into the girl’s car.

What made the mother’s agony more dramatic was her audience.

Sitting before St. Michel were 250 first-time drinking-and-driving offenders whose sentences included listening to her message: But for the grace of God, you could have killed someone.

On the first Thursday evening of every month, increasing numbers of DUI offenders participate in these somber gatherings, required by some Los Angeles judges at the urging of Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The sessions have a special resonance in the wake of two recent crashes--one near Compton and one in Playa del Rey--that wiped out whole families.

Before the speakers took the podium at last week’s meeting, the group of offenders tried to hedge the room’s anxious air by distracting themselves--laughing and joking with seatmates, whispering quietly, rubbing tired eyes or looking around the room, bored.

But when St. Michel and two other women told their stories, the men and women became motionless, fixed their eyes and listened.

St. Michel recalled the moment she arrived at the hospital. Her daughter was already in surgery. It wasn’t until hours later that she could see her.

“Here’s my little angel, laying in a hospital bed, tubes in her nose, tubes in her head,” St. Michel sobbed as many in the gallery cried along with her. “I would have made a bargain with the devil, I’d have bargained with anyone who would listen to me to take me and not her.”

St. Michel held her daughter’s hand for two days before she was forced to remove Robin from life support. “They pulled the plug and my baby was dead,” she said.

The man who killed Robin, treated in the same hospital, lived, St. Michel said. His wife, kneeling and praying with St. Michel during Robin’s last hours, begged God to take her husband and not this girl.

“If Robin and I can save one life, one precious life, then she’s made a difference and I’ve made a difference,” St. Michel told the offenders. “Please remember Robin and don’t drink and drive.”

Several offenders sniffled back tears as she sat down.

MADD started the monthly gatherings, known as victim impact panels, in 1985. At least 20 Los Angeles County judges now regularly augment sentences by requiring offenders to consider the implications of their acts. Separate panels are held in Spanish, and plans are in the works to begin a Korean-language panel.

About the only thing most of the offenders had in common on this evening was their crime. They were young and old, ponytailed men and short-haired women, blonds and brunets dressed in shirt sleeves with ties and T-shirts with jeans. Some had been in drunk-driving accidents. Others were pulled over for another infraction and found to be intoxicated.

Michele Sapper made her way slowly to the podium. When she began talking, her speech, too, was labored.

She started by showing a blown-up picture of a beautiful young woman, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, sitting on a bed. The woman was thin, tanned and smiling confidently.

“That was me before the accident,” Sapper said simply. She left it to her audience to observe the differences between who she was--a pretty, 20-year-old college junior destined for graduate school in child psychology--and who she is: a pale, slightly disfigured thirtysomething woman still on the rebound from a devastating brain injury.

Sapper had been on her way back to her dorm at Cal State Northridge when she was hit head-on by a one-ton pickup truck. The drunk driver, she told the group, never put on his brakes as he careened with her car onto a front lawn.

Her brain smashed into the front of her skull with the impact, she said. Then, it whipped back into the back of her head when the cars stopped moving. She was comatose for two months.

A man in the gallery, wearing a blue, pinstriped button-down, ran a hand through his blond hair and loudly exhaled. Two seats down, a man leaned forward, resting his head on the tops of his fingers.

Sapper said that to the surprise of her doctors, she learned to walk again, although it is still hard for her. She cannot drive. Her short-term memory is limited. She suffers coma-inducing seizures. Her speech is slow and her facial muscles are not always controllable. Her old friends have abandoned her.

“I had a very exciting future that lay ahead, or so I thought,” Sapper told the group. Some, not able to return her gaze, began looking down at their hands, their sneakers, their laps. “Because of somebody’s irresponsibility, that will never occur.”

A man in workman’s blues, a large key ring dangling from his belt loop, wiped the back of a dirty hand across his eyes.

Iris Giorgi told the offenders about the night her two adult daughters were leaving a hockey game at the Forum in 1989, using a crosswalk along with hundreds of other fans to make their way to a parking lot. A drunk driver crossed the median, ignored the police officers stopping traffic and barreled through the crowd.

The older of Giorgi’s daughters, Lynnmaria, tried to push her sister out of the way when she saw the car coming. She tried to jump onto the car’s hood, but two other pedestrians were already flung there and she was sucked underneath.

“She told herself, ‘If I can stay away from the wheels, perhaps I can survive,’ ” Giorgi said evenly. Still trapped under the car when it came to a stop, Lynnmaria was rescued by a group of fans who together lifted the car off of her.

When Giorgi and her husband got the call to come to UCLA Medical Center, no one had any information about Sandra.

Lynnmaria had no left ear. Parts of her scalp were missing. She had three fractured vertebrae, two collapsed lungs, a crushed bladder and a spiral fracture of her left arm.

Giorgi was waiting with her when hospital workers located Sandra, miles away at Daniel Freeman Memorial. She had a fractured pelvis and massive head injuries, including a fractured skull and blood clots in her brain. Doctors said she twice needed to be resuscitated in the emergency room.

Both daughters lived but have chronic pain. Sandra has lost her sense of taste and smell and has been hospitalized more than once for malnutrition. She has started fires on the stove, unable to smell the burning meal.

“I’m very fortunate that I do still have my daughters,” Giorgi said. “But there’s not a day that goes by that I’m not sad. I want my daughters’ health to be better than my health.”

After the victims finished speaking, MADD volunteer Faith Sicklick reiterated what she had told the group at the beginning of the evening: “You are here tonight because you have been given a second chance. Our panel members will never get a second chance.”

Then the three victims lined up near the door to shake each offender’s hand as the group quietly filed out. Many thanked the women.

A 26-year-old man, who asked to be identified only as Robert, quivered as he made his way to the three women. When he reached St. Michel, he hugged her hard and the two of them cried together.

Robert said later that he was arrested after he and his friends had gone to a club. As they had so many weekends before, the friends had some drinks and tried to drive home. This time, however, they smashed into a Westwood street sign and passed out in the car.

“I could see the pain on [St. Michel’s] face,” he said, his eyes ringed red and tears still streaming. “I’m so thankful I didn’t cause that pain on someone else.”

His second chance, Robert promised, meant that there would be no second offense.