Market Tragedy Took Driver’s Spirit, Kin Say

George Russell Weller rarely leaves his home and shuns the community activities that once filled his life. He is hooked up to an intravenous line 24 hours a day.

Since he drove through the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market in July, killing 10 people and injuring 63, Weller has been hospitalized three times. Doctors implanted a pacemaker after discovering a heart condition and then removed it because of an infection.

Friends and family say Weller, 87, has gone from a welcoming and gregarious man to a virtual recluse. He no longer talks about the future.

Police have concluded that Weller didn’t try to stop his Buick as he sped nearly 1,000 feet through the marketplace on Arizona Avenue, slamming into people and toppling fruit and vegetable stands. They have recommended that he be prosecuted on a charge of manslaughter.

But those who know him well insist that it was an accident, not a crime, and say they are troubled by the way he has been portrayed -- as a man who appeared to drive through the market intentionally.

“He is not what everybody thinks he is,” his cousin Jane Cooper said. “Fifteen seconds does not define a life.... What else can you say? It’s a horrible thing. It’s horrible for absolutely everyone.”

Weller’s defense attorneys would not permit him to be interviewed, but several of his friends and relatives shared their thoughts about him and their conversations with him since the crash.

Knowing that people died and suffered as a result of his actions is “shattering” for Weller, said a longtime friend, Bonnie Kramer. “It’s like a heavy cloak that he wears.”

Last month, Santa Monica Police Chief James Butts told reporters that Weller had been “at best, negligent in his operation of a motor vehicle.” Butts said the driver’s medical conditions and reduced mobility might have contributed to the crash.

Police determined that Weller had caused a minor accident before entering the street market and that “pedal misapplication,” or placing the foot on the gas instead of the brake, was the likely explanation for the car’s rapid acceleration.

Prosecutors are reviewing police and California Highway Patrol reports and expect to make a decision in the case soon. CHP investigators determined that Weller had been conscious while driving through the market, avoiding parked cars on either side and reaching speeds of more than 60 mph. Weller’s attorneys say that the crash was a tragic accident and that he was not negligent and did not commit a crime. He exhibited no symptoms to alert him to any driving impairment that day, July 16, they say.

The state Department of Motor Vehicles revoked Weller’s driver’s license after the crash.

Some victims want him behind bars, while others question whether he should be charged. Many say they want to see stricter rules for elderly drivers. Several said they just wanted to hear Weller apologize and explain what had happened during those few deadly minutes.

Weller’s nephew, Robert Bone, said he believed that his uncle had a minor stroke that caused the crash.

Weller is devastated, his nephew added. “He feels this every moment he is awake,” said Bone, 62, a surgeon in La Jolla.

Bone said Weller became a father figure to him when Bone’s father became consumed by alcoholism. Weller taught him how to hammer a nail, tie a necktie and play catcher.

He was the patriarch of the family, Bone said, host at family events and holiday dinners, where he always offered toasts.

Weller, a graduate of Los Angeles High School and UCLA, married his wife, Harriet, in 1939 at Wilshire Crest Presbyterian Church. He worked as a food broker, and she taught school in Bel-Air. He served in the Korean War.

Since retirement, he has devoted much of his life to tutoring high school students, organizing book sales for the Santa Monica Friends of the Library and serving as a mentor for young people at Brentwood Presbyterian Church.

Weller has walked with a cane since hip surgery and suffers from lumbar arthritis and spinal stenosis.

He has one daughter, Meredith Edens; two grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Edens retired in June from her job as a special education resource specialist at Santa Monica High School.

Kramer, a retired teacher who has known the Wellers more than 30 years, said he is the “type of man I’d want my son to grow up to be.” She turned to him for support when her brother was diagnosed with cancer and when her father was in the hospital.

Kramer, 59, who visits the couple several times each week, said Weller had become much more introspective, reserved and reluctant to speak his mind since the market tragedy. His wife, too, has lost her sense of vitality and is filled with anxiety and fear. They both have aged more quickly since the crash, friends said.

Weller spends his days catering to his wife’s needs, making her coffee and sandwiches, ordering the groceries to be delivered. He reads the newspaper. He starts books but rarely finishes them. The Wellers feel the despair of the “unthinkable tragedy,” and “despair of what is facing them,” Kramer said.

Before the incident, Weller visited friends, talked politics and always had a story to tell. Now he stays home, reportedly unable to relieve his conscience and afraid of how people will react. He and his wife, who used to welcome visitors into their home, now keep their shutters drawn and their door shut.

“It was always a house wide open to the community,” Kramer said. “It’s now a house where there is sorrow and trepidation.”

Elza Gross, a cousin, said she was in New Mexico at the time of the crash. She turned on the television after her daughter called. When she saw how dazed Weller looked after getting out of his car, Gross said, she thought something was medically wrong with him.

“To think that this tragedy is somehow due to his carelessness or his irresponsibility is inconceivable to me,” said Gross, 63, a retired casting director. “This is a person who always put other people first, a man who would never put the lives of others in jeopardy.”

Cooper, another cousin, said that when she moved from Iowa to Southern California 14 years ago, the Wellers became her surrogate parents.

Now Russ Weller, who has a sharp mind and a sense of humor, is weaker than ever. “It’s hard to live a normal life,” she said, “once something like this has happened.”