‘97 O.C. crash still takes a toll

There were 10 teenagers in the SUV that night, hurtling toward summer. Crammed elbow-to-elbow from the cab to the luggage pit of a 1989 Chevrolet Blazer were five seniors and five juniors from Newport Harbor High School. They had been partying all night; many had been drinking; most were not wearing seat belts.

It was Friday, May 23, 1997. They were speeding along Irvine Avenue next to Upper Newport Bay. Behind the wheel was a varsity baseball player who didn’t drink but was taking the curves too fast. Just after midnight, the Blazer struck a median and started tumbling. Seconds later, they lay scattered across the road or pinned beneath the mangled SUV. They had broken ribs and cracked skulls and ribbons of missing skin. One passenger, an 18-year-old honors student, was dead. Two others had severe head injuries.

Soon, there would be a ferocious debate about how far over the 35 mph speed limit the Blazer was traveling. About whether the driver deserved to pay with prison. Even in the inexhaustible annals of end-of-school tragedies, this one struck a deep chord -- perhaps because of its magnitude, and perhaps because Newport Harbor’s rich-kid mystique suggested an archetypal tale of wealth, reckless youth and disaster.

For a while, Southern California would know the teenagers’ names, would argue about them and pray for them.

When the cameras went away, most were able to proceed with their lives, the accident a terrible but receding memory. For others, the last 10 years have been more complicated.

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As Amanda Arthur, a high school junior, lay in a coma with a severe brain injury, week after week, doctors braced her mother, Chris Maese, for the possibility -- they believed even the likelihood -- that she would never wake up. Even if she did, they said, she would linger forever in a vegetative state.

Arthur was 17, the varsity song captain of the school pep squad. Her mother was unemployed, her stepfather a self-employed plumber, and she had no medical insurance.

More than two months after the crash, she woke up and said, “Hi, Mom.” She began to smile with half her face, to recognize her family. Her recovery, which impressed people as miraculous, became the focus of a “20/20” episode. By September she had returned to Newport Harbor, and the next month she was crowned homecoming queen. Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers held a concert to help pay her bills.

Arthur’s recovery was fitful and incomplete, her right side partially paralyzed. She found a sense of purpose working part time at the Fountain Valley Cancer Center, doing odd chores, fetching doctors’ lunches. She attended a driving school for victims of brain trauma. After many failures, she passed her driving test and surprised her mom by buying a car.

Early last year, she married an Australian-born computer programmer she met at the Little Knight bar in Costa Mesa, Mike Edwards, and on Christmas Eve she gave birth to a girl, Audrey. She’s wanted to be a mother since she had Cabbage Patch kids as a little girl.

“It was always a given for me,” she says, cradling the baby in the living room of her Irvine apartment, which is full of baby books and sun.

Though she is alert and intelligent, her speech is still a little slow, and her limp is pronounced. She was so determined to get around without help that she learned to walk by dragging her paralyzed right side. “I taught myself wrong,” she says.

She has no memory of the crash, she says, nor any resentment toward the driver, Jason Rausch, who visited her bedside for months during her recovery, even as he became the target of widespread outrage. “It has made my life a lot harder,” she says of the crash, but adds, “It wasn’t his fault.”

As Arthur healed, Rausch found himself the target of a criminal prosecution. The state charged him with felony vehicular homicide and alleged he was traveling up to 67 in the 35 mph zone. His defense lawyer argued that the Blazer, which belonged to the family of the teenager who was killed, was overloaded and had been jacked up 7 inches higher than the manufacturer intended. The lawyer also argued that Rausch was going only 44 mph, that Irvine Avenue was dangerous to begin with, and made more so because it was slippery from sprinklers.

In the end, a judge convicted him of a lesser charge of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter for the death of Donny Bridgman. At a sentencing hearing, the dead teen’s mother, Vickie Bridgman, elicited gasps from onlookers when she placed what she called a “present” in front of Rausch: two framed photos of her son, one before the crash, one as he lay in an ambulance afterward.

Arthur’s mother, however, defended Rausch, telling the courtroom that he had begged her forgiveness and that she had granted it. The judge said jail would only amount to vengeance and gave Rausch probation.

Amanda Arthur remembers the toll it took on Rausch, who after high school played football at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa. Once, she says, he asked her opinion on whether he should leave Orange County. “Go, Jason,” she recalls saying. “Get out of here. These people are cruel to you.”

Maese, her mother, urges her not to harbor anger, saying, “In order to expect a miracle in Amanda’s life I had to forgive Jason, a young boy, for driving too fast. He was in car ....”

“Overloaded, top-heavy,” Arthur cuts in. “If we were seat-belted in, we would have been mashed potatoes because it flipped three times.”

“I know it was very hard for him,” Maese says of Rausch. “He was a good, Christian boy.”

For a while, Maese says, Vickie Bridgman visited Arthur as she recovered but couldn’t tolerate that Maese allowed Rausch to visit too. “She was very upset with me that I’d allow him to come. I told her that I could not allow him not to come,” Maese says. “She asked me if I loved him, and I said yes. She said I was crazy.”

What happened to the other survivors? One works in a printing shop, one for a real estate investment company. Another went to law school and is awaiting the results of the bar exam. One escaped serious injury in the crash but died later of a drug overdose. Some, like Jason Rausch, won’t talk to the Los Angeles Times.

Eric Freeman, who was 18, says the experience changed him profoundly. He suffered broken ribs and whiplash and became a star witnesses for the prosecution, testifying that Rausch was speeding around Irvine Avenue’s sharp curves. He remembers the defense attorney’s hard questioning, and what he felt was a portrayal of him as “a crazy, alcoholic piece of dirt,” which left him with a chip on his shoulder.

Now, he’s a banker and owns a house in Costa Mesa. He thinks of his dead friend and says, “I felt like I owed it to Donny not to be a loser.”

Danny Townsend, then 18, suffered a severe head injury when the Blazer spun and rolled. He’s tumbling still.

For a glimpse of the boy he was, look inside the 1997 Newport Harbor High School yearbook. Page after page, the senior boys are in formal suits and ties. Yet at a school famous for its preoccupation with appearances, Townsend on photo day opted for an off-the-wall plaid jacket and a goofy smirk. In the photo honoring him as class clown, he posed in green pants, his tongue sticking comically out of his mouth as a girl pretended to garrote him.

“I was pretty friendly, and a good all-around person,” he says of the guy he was before the crash.

He’s sitting at a Costa Mesa coffee shop, eating chocolate cake -- a big, shambling guy in a flannel shirt. His hair is a little disheveled, his speech a little slurred, but his smile is open and friendly.

On the night of the crash, he says, he didn’t want to get into the overpacked Blazer, but his friends insisted. In the accident, his head was smashed so hard it changed his brain forever.

He woke up after more than a week in a coma, and things were different. He loved computers, but his mind wandered. He tried taking classes at a local community college but dropped out.

The real trouble started two years after the crash, in July 1999, when police arrested him for operating a watercraft while intoxicated. He got probation. Then in February 2003, Orange County deputies came looking for him after receiving tips that he’d made threats against both a friend’s mother and Orange County Sheriff Michael S. Carona.

When deputies searched his bedroom in Costa Mesa, they found something that disturbed them. According to authorities, pinned to his door was a news clipping about a decapitated woman, plus a picture of the sheriff with a bull’s-eye drawn on his forehead and a scribbled message: “I’ll serve it up to you, too ....”

The newspapers, in reporting Townsend’s arrest, cited the head injuries he suffered in the Irvine Avenue crash. His family explained that he had never recovered, that he had trouble with his medications. He got three years’ probation after pleading guilty to making threats against the friend’s mother, underwent extensive psychiatric counseling, and enrolled in a 12-step program for substance abuse.

Since the crash, he has suffered from “a certain manic psychosis.” He has a quick temper, and he forgets easily. He haunts old record shops and reads Charles Bukowski, the poet-novelist famous for his depictions of hard, alcohol-soaked living. He says his arrest left him branded.

“It’s really hard to find your way out of it,” he says. “You’re by the wayside. Sometimes you’re hanging onto life. They put you in the guillotine.... You’re a menace. You’re not safe. I got pinned on some pretty heavy charges.”

He eats his cake. He doesn’t see the Newport Harbor crowd anymore. He smiles, remembering the classmate who was killed, Donny Bridgman, his charisma and cockiness. “He had some James Dean in him,” he says. “He had some danger in him.”

He’s living with his parents. He’d like to get away from here, find a small town, but he doesn’t have the money. He’s not one of these aggressive bar-scene guys, he says, so it’s tough to meet people in Orange County.

“I really haven’t had a date in 10 years, dude,” he says. “I’m just a loser. I really don’t have any friends.”

Over the last decade, he’s held jobs as a busboy, a pizza deliveryman, a worker at a chicken shack, a clerk at a Super 8 motel. He says he was fired from the motel. He is asked why. He grows uncomfortable. His cake finished, he stands up abruptly. He doesn’t want to talk about his life anymore.

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christopher.goffard@latimes.com