Advocate for the Disabled Seeks a U-Turn on Car Deal

Louisea Hurwitz is a hearing person who comprehends the silence and discrimination visited upon the deaf. As a teacher of the hearing impaired, she has listened to the horror stories of how deaf people are mistreated, right here in Los Angeles.

“The non-sighted are seen as being smart. Even though they’re blind, they’ve still got their ears,” said Hurwitz, who teaches sign language to 25 hearing and deaf students at a West Los Angeles church. “But deaf people are looked upon as deaf and dumb and having no brains.”

But even Hurwitz, a woman who has seen it all and has a well-padded outrage button, was fighting mad about the recent car-buying experience of a deaf friend.

The way she tells it, Juan Marquez went to the South Bay Toyota sales lot in Gardena last month knowing exactly what kind of car he wanted: a spanking new Tercel, just like the one pictured in the newspaper advertisement he held in his hand.

But, Marquez, 47, couldn’t articulate to salesmen that he could barely afford the car’s $8,976 asking price. He couldn’t tell them he has been deaf since infancy, or that he struggles to read or write, or that he has little command of English or Spanish.

A brother was supposed to compensate for this by escorting him to the dealer, but he did not come. So Marquez could only attempt to form words and point at the car in the ad.

More than four hours later, after dealing with several salesmen, he drove off with a new $16,000 leased Tercel.

Only when Marquez showed his paperwork to co-workers, Hurwitz said, did he learn that he did not own the car and that his lease payments and insurance--at $500 a month--were far more than he could afford on his $1,300 monthly salary as a janitor in a West Los Angeles police station.

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Marquez, a man with swept-back white hair and gentle brown eyes, known as “Johnnie” to Hurwitz and friends, said in sign language: “I thought the car was mine.”

The dealer says a deal is a deal and although Marquez is deaf, “his eyes work perfectly” and that he picked out the car of his choice and agreed to the terms of the lease.

Salesman Scooter Kindall said the two communicated just fine.

“I’ve sold cars to deaf people before and he told me he read lips,” he said. “So I communicated with him that way. I talked loud and enunciated my words. I wrote things down. He seemed to understand things very well.”

The controversy, Hurwitz said, points to a lack of safeguards in laws designed to protect the impaired from being coerced into long-term legal contracts. Ultimately, it raises the question of whether any law can cover gray areas of human behavior.

The 1990 federal Americans With Disabilities Act requires businesses to make accommodations for people with disabilities, such as providing sign language interpreters for those who cannot read, write or read lips.

But experts say that the more than 750,000 hearing-impaired people in Los Angeles County still face a continuing problem with signing contracts they do not fully comprehend.

Hurwitz said: “It’s the ethical and legal duty of these salesmen, when dealing with a hearing- and verbally impaired person, to insist that he return with someone who could help him understand what he is buying.”

So like a mother eagle, she took Marquez under her wing and went looking for answers.

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She called lawyers for pro bono advice. She called a dozen government agencies, from the county’s Department of Consumer Affairs--who told her “cooling off” laws did not apply to car purchases--to Department of Motor Vehicles investigators, who said they would look into the case. She even wrote to television stations and newspapers.

With a friend who once sold cars, she brought Marquez back to the dealers for a face-off with the salesmen. But after four hours of haggling, she said dealers refused to accept the car back, refund Marquez’s $1,500 down payment or return his late-model trade-in.

“It just made me mad,” Hurwitz said. “Johnnie’s like a little baby in some ways, so vulnerable. He’s my friend and an example of what’s happening to deaf people. To have someone put him out on the street with that kind of financial burden is just unthinkable.”

The car dealers said they offered Marquez a deal at the face-off meeting that would let him purchase the car under regular financing, but that his group refused. “We offered to assist them,” said general manager Tom Burchett. “What did we do wrong? He even got a second chance to negotiate a deal. Nobody gets that in the car business.”

Two weeks later, accompanied by a lawyer, Hurwitz and Marquez dropped the car at the dealership with a note saying he wanted to rescind his deal. But a few days later, salesmen returned the car to Marquez’s Westside home when he was absent and dropped the keys in the mailbox.

Adding insult to injury, Hurwitz said, they left a note saying that the next time something was wrong with his car, he should specify what he wanted fixed.

Marquez now leaves the car at his home and takes the bus to work.

Hurwitz, while having seemingly few cards left to play, says she is not ready to chalk this battle up to experience.

“The real crime here is that a handicapped person was highly taken advantage of, a person who is just as kind as can be but who doesn’t know much about the world,” she said. “But if I can do anything about it, his voice is going to be heard.”