Driver Who Killed 2 Women Gets House Arrest, Cell-Phone Curbs

A Pacific Palisades lawyer whose car struck and killed two women as they crossed a Santa Monica street was sentenced Thursday to 120 days of house arrest and ordered not to talk on her cell phone while driving.

Cheryl Chadwick, 46, was charged with two misdemeanor manslaughter counts after fatally injuring Mariya Diment, 70, and Liya Murkes, 71, a year ago.

The home detention, which will be monitored electronically, is in lieu of a 90-day jail term. Chadwick was placed on three years’ probation and instructed to write letters of apology for the accident last June 23.

Police asserted that Chadwick was talking on her cell phone when her Mercedes hit the two women, both Russian immigrants, as they walked across Ocean Avenue for a nightly stroll along the beach. After the crash, Chadwick refused to get out of her car and refused to talk to police at the scene, authorities said.

She communicated with police 17 days later--by fax. In it, Chadwick denied being on the phone at the time of the crash.

“In the face of this horrible accident, I became overwhelmed with gripping fear that the people who had been hit would die,” she also wrote. “I could not force myself to get out.”

Superior Court Commissioner Roberta Kyman said Chadwick will be allowed to drive to and from work and the grocery store, and can take her child to school and church during the four-month home detention. Chadwick must not use her cell phone while driving, however.

Prosecutor David Fairchild, a deputy Santa Monica city attorney, said the phone ban is unusual. “I’ve never heard of that as part of a sentence before,” he said after Thursday’s court session.

Chadwick’s sentence was harsher than one proposed in early May, when authorities were suggesting that she be required to do only 50 hours of community service--giving traffic-school lectures on the dangers of talking on the cell phone while driving. But the recommended sentence was changed after relatives of the two dead women protested.

Alla Diment, a West Hollywood bookkeeper who is a daughter of Mariya Diment, said she was surprised that Chadwick will be allowed to continue driving during her house arrest.

“It’s unfair, but it’s the best we can do,” Diment said. “It’s all so sad.”

The deaths of Diment and Murkes, meantime, have helped prompt a 1 1/2-year “Walkable Westside” safety program that began last month in Santa Monica, Culver City, West Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Various grants will finance the $396,000 education effort, which will use orange-suited mimes, posters and billboards to urge Westside motorists and pedestrians alike to be alert for each other.