Youth’s Death Spurs Call for Tougher Driving Laws

Last summer, Judi and Greg Arnett got the phone call that nightmares are made of.

Their teenage son, Chase, had been killed in a nighttime car crash blocks from their home in the upscale North Ranch neighborhood of Thousand Oaks.

Gregory Chase Arnett, 13, was a passenger in a high-performance Ford F-150 pickup driven by a 16-year-old neighbor who was speeding home from a video store.

The pickup skidded off a curve, smashed into a pine tree, rolled down an embankment and flipped over. A 15-year-old passenger was hospitalized with a broken collarbone and internal bleeding. The boys had slipped out of the house while the Arnetts were out to dinner.

The driver, who had received his provisional license two months before the July 10 crash, admitted to gross vehicular manslaughter and was ordered this month to spend 30 days in Juvenile Hall and four months wearing an electronic monitor, followed by more than a year of community service.

The neighborhood already had been jarred by the deaths of teens in a speeding car. Three days after Christmas 2001, North Ranch resident Kenneth Glass, 16, took three friends the same age on a food run after 1 a.m. Driving at more than 100 mph, he smashed his mother’s Mercedes-Benz station wagon into a brick wall. Glass and his front-seat passenger, Jordan Bass, died at the scene; the other two teens recovered.

In both cases, neither driver should have had teenage passengers.

Motorists under 18 are prohibited from having anyone under 20 in the car during their first six months with a license unless a parent, guardian or driver 25 years or older is with them. They also may not drive between midnight and 5 a.m. for the first 12 months unless supervised, with exceptions for work or medical necessity.

California is one of 40 states and the District of Columbia with graduated licenses, and about half of those states have some form of passenger and nighttime driving restrictions.

But many teens wager they will never get caught. Law enforcement officers in California cannot stop a teen driver with other young people in the car in order to check whether he or she is driving with a provisional license. Another violation, such as running a red light or speeding, must occur to prompt the stop.

The penalty for not obeying the provisional license requirements is $35 for a first offense and eight to 16 hours of community service. A second offense pushes the fine to $50 and a third day of community service.

“If they raised the penalties, maybe they’d take it more seriously,” said Robert Stahl, owner of Dollar Driving School. “Kids drive around with their friends in the car as soon as they get their license.”

Graduated licensing laws “have deterred a number of people from breaking the rules, but certainly the penalties are not enough,” said Henning Mortensen, incoming president of the Driving Schools Assn. of California. “We want to reduce crashes.”

Vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for 15- to 20-year-olds, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. In California last year, 810 people died in crashes involving drivers in that age group, more than in any other state. In Texas, the tally was 805.

The Arnetts would like to see state law changed to dissuade teens from violating passenger restrictions, such as automatic suspension or revocation of their licenses and stiff fines for their parents.

“I’m not going to change the world,” said Judi Arnett, an administrator at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. “I just look at what would have changed the events of that evening.”

California adopted the passenger rules and nighttime restrictions in 1998, at the same time that it increased required instruction time for teens.

In the next two years, crashes involving 16- and 17-year-olds that resulted in serious injury or death decreased 28%, according to a study by the Southern California Injury Prevention Research Center at UCLA.

By the third year, crashes involving 16-years-olds had dropped 40%, an Automobile Club of Southern California study reported.

The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety says more crashes could be avoided if states set nighttime driving bans for teens earlier in the evening (41% of teen crashes occur between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.) and tougher passenger prohibitions.

Assemblyman Bill Maze (R-Visalia) plans to introduce a bill that would prohibit teen drivers from carrying underage passengers for a full year and set the nighttime restriction at 11 p.m., an hour earlier, said Sam Cannon, his chief of staff. This is an amended version of a bill that Maze proposed in March that would have raised the minimum driving age to 17. The bill never made it out of committee.

Maze is open to considering stiffer penalties for violators, Cannon said.

“If making some changes is able to prevent the death of one person, then we’re getting back in the right direction,” he said. “Enhanced penalties may act as a disincentive ... and we’d like to see a much greater parental responsibility.”

Sgt. Patti Salas of the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said repeat offenders would think twice if the consequence were having their provisional licenses revoked.

“If kids realized they could lose their license until they’re 18, I think that might tend to make them comply much better.”

Parents also have that option.

“It’s the parents who control the car keys. They can impose the penalties they want,” said Allan F. Williams, the Insurance Institute’s chief scientist. “They need to be vigilant and pretty tough about this.”

As the Arnetts face the first new year without their only son, they say they will draw closer to their three daughters and prepare to take their cause to Sacramento.

“There’s absolutely nothing that will bring him back, but the idea of him dying without anything good coming of it would drive me absolutely insane,” said Greg Arnett, a retired dentist. “We need to try to get the public’s attention. My son’s death didn’t do it.”