Family Pilgrimage of Grief Leads to Courtroom

They journeyed from across the country to share a few moments of grief with the man who killed their parents. The brother from Portland, the sister from Seattle, the cousin from Pittsburgh each rose and testified how a drunk driver had ripped a hole through their family.

The driver in question--Watson Cromwell Dobbs Jr.--was sentenced Wednesday in Santa Monica Superior Court to nine years in state prison for killing John and Ruth Guth last August in a head-on collision in Playa del Rey. The couple left seven adult children, 16 grandchildren and a chorus of friends. The crash also claimed the lives of Ruth Guth’s sister and their 93-year-old mother.

Before Judge Paul G. Flynn pronounced sentence Wednesday, members of the Guth family were given an opportunity to voice their pain. The normally chatty courtroom fell silent as relatives of the retired chemical engineer and his wife strode to the lectern in Department C to unload their emotional demons.

“I’ve lost my trust in the world, that things will work out in the end,” said Ann Guth Eisenberg, a fiction writer from the Seattle area who told the court she has suffered panic attacks and lost weight in the aftermath of the tragedy. “My faith in God is in shambles.”

Yet even as Eisenberg and the others spoke of personal agony, they and Dobbs sought to make peace with each other in an emotional hearing that drew tears on both sides.

“The sadness and remorse on his face helps me understand that I’m not the only one who’s suffering,” Eisenberg said of Dobbs. “His willingness to take responsibility for his actions has cleared the confusion, anger and urge for justice from my mind and allowed me to see him for who he is--a fellow human being. Someone who matters. I pray he finds the strength and support he needs to heal . . . wish him peace.”

Dobbs, dressed in a jail-issue blue uniform and seated in the courtroom jury box, dropped his head into his hands and wiped away tears even before the hearing began. He glanced toward the audience only a few times as the family members spoke, quickly looking away or down at his feet as he listened.

At the end of the session, Dobbs, 57, offered his own somber apology. He paused a few moments, then read quietly from a statement he had prepared.

“From the moment I found out what happened, I felt remorse,” said Dobbs, who entered the courtroom on crutches because of a broken kneecap suffered in the accident. “I’m asking the Guth family to forgive me.”

The head-on collision had its own ironic twist: Dobbs was Ruth Guth’s golf teacher at the Westchester Golf Course, near the couple’s home. She had taken up the sport to spend time with her recently retired husband.

“The Guths occupied a very special place in my mind,” Dobbs said. “Every time I close my eyes, every time my leg hurts, I think of them.”

Dobbs’ blood-alcohol level registered 0.14% shortly after the evening accident, in which his sports car slammed into the vehicle driven by the Guths on Lincoln Boulevard in Playa del Rey.

John and Ruth Guth, her sister, Mary Helen Maher, and their mother, Florence Maher, had spent the hours before the Aug. 26 accident celebrating two milestones: the Guths’ 46th wedding anniversary and Florence Maher’s birthday one day before. The Maher women were completing a visit from Pennsylvania and had would have returned the day after the crash.

Cathy Levine of Pittsburgh, the niece of Ruth Guth and Mary Maher, said she had planned to meet her grandmother and aunt at the Pittsburgh airport on their way to commuter connections to outlying areas. Levine said she flew in from Pittsburgh so she could visit the crash site and to see Dobbs apologize for killing her loved ones, including a grandmother she had known as “Sweetie.”

“I needed to come speak and to come see where it happened,” she said. “I always heard that Mr. Dobbs was remorseful.”

At Wednesday’s hearing, Deputy Dist. Atty. Michael Latin read a statement forwarded by Mary Maher’s Benedictine order in Erie, Pa.

“Sister Mary Helen’s death continues to be a sad and lingering loss for our community,” Latin quoted the statement as saying. “We have great empathy for the Guth children and for the many other relatives of the Maher family as they continue to struggle with their own sorrow.

“We know, too, that Mr. Dobbs, himself has faced and will continue to face for the rest of his life, the painful reality of this tragedy. That knowledge alone must certainly be a profound life-altering awareness for him.”

Son Joe Guth of Portland, Ore., told the court he believes the tragedy scarred everyone involved.

“We’ve all been sentenced to a cell we didn’t choose,” said Guth, 35. “We all wish we could have our old lives back. Instead, all of us have been left scrambling to make order out of our lives.”

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Several of John and Ruth Guth’s friends from their Westchester parish, Visitation Catholic Church, also showed up at Wednesday’s hearing to offer support. They recalled the Guths, who grew up in Oil City, Pa., and had lived in Los Angeles for four decades, as devout people, generous with their time and love. “They were the ambassadors of hospitality,” recalled Mary Lou Ward, a friend of nearly 40 years.

Family and friends alike emerged silently from the court session. They hugged and kissed and cried in the hallway outside the courtroom. Some said it felt as though one small piece of a huge burden had been lifted from their shoulders.

But there was one more emotional hurdle to overcome. The Guths’ seven grown children planned to spend the evening at their parents’ empty Westchester house. They were going to hold their own farewell ceremony in their childhood home that will be sold by the end of the month.

“If you’re afraid of pain, you’re never going to heal,” Ann Eisenberg said. “But I trust that we will bring healing to ourselves in the long run.”