Fair Consequences

The February car crash that took the lives of Rodney David Adams, Dominic Ianozzi and brothers Timothy and Daniel Renolds was no accident. In case anyone doubted that, Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Charles Peven made it clear last week when he sentenced 19-year-old Marcus Christian Lellan to eight years in prison for four counts of vehicular manslaughter with gross negligence and reckless driving.

Skid marks showed Lellan, then 18 and a senior at Canyon High School, was driving 103 mph when he tried to use a bicycle lane to pass cars on the right, swerved, lost control, smashed through the median and flipped his Acura, landing on top of Adams’ Mustang. The 45-year-old Adams, a Santa Clarita letter carrier, had survived a stroke and the Northridge earthquake. But he did not survive Marcus Lellan. He died instantly, as did three of Lellan’s four teenage passengers.

Such blatant recklessness was no aberration. Lellan had been cited twice in the five months leading up to the crash for speeding on that very stretch of Canyon Country road. Perhaps the most distressing detail to come out of Wednesday’s sentencing was the court document that recounted how, in the moments before the crash, Lellan’s passengers had screamed for him to slow down. He ignored them.

It is unlikely he has been able to forget the screams since.

Some of Lellan’s young friends have argued that such memories are punishment enough. Lellan shouldn’t be prosecuted, they said. He shouldn’t serve time.

Lellan early on changed his no contest plea to guilty and expressed remorse--an appropriate response, but also a tactical one that, under court policies, allowed him to shop for a lenient judge. His attorney argued for two years. But Judge Peven was right to call this an act of willful and deliberate recklessness that deserves no leniency.

A tough sentence not only keeps Marcus Lellan from being a danger to others, it conveys the message to those who still, even now, seem not to have heeded that actions have consequences. With vehicle crashes the No. 1 cause of death for teenagers, this is a life and death lesson.