Short Life and Slow Death in the Fast Lane : Crash Victims Tell Their Cautionary Tales

James Marshall can never remember the nightmare that jars him from his sleep and leaves him coated in sweat. Doctors tell him the dream is probably another visit to that desolate spot on the Antelope Valley Freeway near Red Rock Canyon, the place where Marshall’s body was battered by a horrific collision of metal and glass against asphalt.

“They told me that all my mind can remember is the pain, not the events,” said Marshall, whose body bears long, gruesome scars from his 1989 accident. The hole in his skull is now covered by a metal plate, new skin and hair, but his brain will never fully heal. He can’t hold a job and needs medication to control his emotions.

“Basically, my future is shot,” the husky 26-year-old said. “Any kid who gets into a car and does stupid things should look at me. They could be me. And it’s not a pretty sight.”

For Marshall and other survivors of traumatic accidents in their youth, each new headline about another generation repeating the same mistakes stirs up feelings of frustration and regret. Many of these survivors want to reach out and share their stories, in the hope that young people will believe that it can happen to them.

It is a message that seems especially crucial this summer, when youthful drivers have been at the wheel for accidents that left 10 Orange County teens dead and more than a dozen badly injured.

While Marshall cannot bring back the images of his own accident in his memory or dreams, he had the chilling sense that history was repeating itself a few weeks ago, as he heard the news reports of a July 29 crash outside Victorville.

The pattern was eerily familiar. Four local teens were dead in an accident that was almost a mirror image of his own.

In both cases, a sports utility vehicle packed with young people was racing down a desert road after a weekend of partying. In both, the truck flipped and rolled, hurtling bodies through the air. Both times, police found beer cans strewn among the wreckage.

The suspected causes of the two crashes were also painfully similar: Speed and alcohol and youthful hubris.

“It makes you wonder if there is any way to stop these things from happening,” said Marshall, who now addresses students and other groups, to share his cautionary tale. “The same thing over and over. Another one down.”

Just 12 days after the desert crash that killed four Katella High School students, two Fountain Valley 16-year-olds died in the back seat of a candy apple red 1968 Mustang, which was allegedly traveling faster than 70 m.p.h. on a residential street when it clipped another car and slammed into a tree and a utility wall, police said. The reason for the carnage? One of the victims was late to driver’s education class, his father said.

Less than a week later, an 18-year-old whom authorities said was drunk veered off the road and smacked into a tree along Gilbert Street in Anaheim. The driver was unhurt, but a 17-year-old passenger in the car died at the hospital and a second rider was injured.

Twenty minutes later, another 17-year-old died in a separate crash in Fountain Valley, an accident police attributed to racing. This time, the car allegedly zoomed through the intersection of Brookhurst Street and Edinger Avenue at more than 80 m.p.h. when it was broadsided by another car, authorities said.

In all, 20 Orange County drivers between ages 15 and 21 have died in 1995. That number does not include the four youngsters who were killed this summer as passengers in cars driven by their peers. It also does not factor in the four teens who died in the desert crash.

They are society’s newest drivers, and often the most fearless.

Everyone from parents to cops to emergency room nurses ask why they do it, why they ignore all the warnings with an exasperated roll of their eyes. In fact, they know, because they all have been there.

At 16 or 17, a week in a classroom or at work feels like a year, so the weekend must be packed to the limits with fun. For a teen, a car is freedom, and freedom demands to be celebrated.

Johnny Yanes knows the urge that pushes young people to go faster. Yanes himself used to live the fast life. At 21, nothing mattered more to Yanes than partying with his buddies, enjoying the warm buzz of beer and pot, the energizing rush of cocaine and street races, he said.

On the night the paramedics picked him up off the street, Yanes had been riding his father’s brand new motorcycle. It was a sleek machine with muscle and a roar that made the young man giddy and scared all at once. He was drunk and high, he said, and didn’t think twice about accepting a challenge to race.

“I was going 100, maybe,” Yanes, now 35, said in a wavering voice, standing at the corner of the intersection where he nearly died. “Too fast. Too fast.”

The bike began to wobble and Yanes careened out of control. When Yanes came out of his coma a month later, the witnesses who visited him said the sliding bike trailed sparks for some 50 feet before Yanes, who wasn’t wearing a helmet, was tossed clear.

The physical therapists helped him rise up out of his wheelchair in less than 10 months. The plastic surgeons, remarkably, managed to rebuild his face. But no one could help Yanes completely rebound from the brain damage.

His memory is like a bad phone connection, fading in and out and sometimes failing altogether. He has mood swings and bouts with depression. His reading skills are that of a fourth grader. He can’t hold on to a job longer than eight months. He hopes a new job at a Costa Mesa car wash will change his luck.

Yanes speaks and moves in a sort of slow motion, like a man underwater. He is swindled all the time, he says sheepishly, because people see him as an easy mark. He becomes confused and frustrated. He gets lonely.

“I have been single a long time,” the Garden Grove resident said. “I used to have three or four girlfriends, before the accident, you know? Now it is really hard to hold a relationship. I have problems with my family. I get angry. . . . “

Yanes’ pain is evident. The scars on his shoulders and legs are from the unforgiving pavement at the intersection of Greenville Street and Warner Avenue, but the narrow slashes on the inside of his left wrist are by his own hand. It has been a decade since he tried to kill himself, but the suffering is still there.

“Life is pretty hard,” he said staring at the red slashes. “I miss the way I used to be. Tell the people, the young people, not to do stupid things when they drive. The mistakes don’t go away.”

Yanes’ mistakes are familiar ground for Anne Marie Bredehoft, a Loma Linda University graduate student who spent two years working with Orange County teen-agers convicted of driving under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Bredehoft was a facilitator for a court-ordered program that forced the youths to see firsthand the potential consequences of their actions.

More than 500 area teens passed through Bredehoft’s discussion groups and took the program’s often grisly tours of the UCI Medical Center intensive care unit and the Orange County coroner’s office. The sights of mangled cadavers and automobile accident victims quaking in pain often force the program participants to shed their illusions of invulnerability, she said.

“They all think it can’t happen to them,” Bredehoft said. “But then, as they are walking through these places and they see people their own age, and the nurse tells them, ‘We don’t expect this girl to live through the night,’ well, that shakes them up a bit. I think something like that stays with them. . . . I think, if it were possible, they should make everyone take that tour.”

Psychiatrist Paul Blair of Orange, who specializes in trauma situations and victim counseling, said the lack of life experience and the cozy shelter of adolescence breeds a feeling of immunity in youngsters.

“Bad things happen to other people,” is how Blair sums up their thinking. “A lot [of these kids] have not been exposed to terrible things. So to encounter these things is like a thunderbolt out of the blue.”

Blair himself nearly died in an accident at age 19, when some loose gravel on a tricky turn caused him to lose control of his car on a remote Arizona road. He had to postpone his senior year of college and underwent six years of reconstructive surgery after being pinned beneath his vehicle. Blair said there was no alcohol or drugs involved in his mishap, but he doesn’t discount the possibility that youth played a part in the incident.

“Young people have a limited amount of experience and a great deal of confidence,” he said. “Sometimes that can lead to poor judgment.”

Chris Rommel was 19 when his admittedly poor judgment cost him a sizable chunk of his future. A U.S. Marine at the time, Rommel was on his motorcycle one afternoon seven years ago, dogging the rear bumper of “a geezer in a big boat of a car” on two-lane road near Camp Pendleton. Rommel had just put in some major hours on kitchen detail and he wanted to get home to Orange. He had no time for speed limits.

Rommel could not pass on the left, so he gunned his engine and rode alongside the car, hugging the right shoulder. But he didn’t account for the curve in the road that forced the big car to swing wide and collide with him.

“Just my luck,” Rommel said last week while hanging out at the Clubhouse, a recreation and therapy facility in Orange for people recovering from head injuries. He snapped his fingers. “It happened just like that. My life went to hell, man. Hell on earth.”

Rommel flew some 100 feet when his bike smacked into the car. His forehead was shattered and his face swollen and ragged. A divot in his throat marks the spot where the doctors installed a tracheotomy tube.

“The life I had before the accident and the life after . . . there was a 100% change,” Rommel said, again snapping his fingers. “When I woke up in the hospital, I thought I was going to die. Then, after that, I wished I had died.”

His military career and ambition to become an architect are nothing but vague memories in a muddled mind now. He tires easily and his conversations veer into odd tangents. Seizures and bouts of confusion make it impossible for Rommel to drive. His world, he said, has grown very small.

“Nobody wants to be around people like me,” he said. “They think brain-injured people are retarded or weird or whacked out or whatever. I wonder why it happened? You can’t know what it’s like.”

The persistent finger-snapping, like Rommel’s habit of saluting every few minutes, make his conversations sound like a broken record. He can’t stop it, but he recognizes that it can be trying for others.

“How old do I seem to you?” he said in a rising voice. “Nineteen? I feel like I’m 19, I act like I’m 19, but I’m really 26. How many years is that? Just gone. That’s messed up. That’s just so messed up.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Troubled Drives

Although the number of young drivers at the wheel during Orange County fatal and injury accidents has generally declined for the last five years, 20 have been killed already this year. Drivers 15-21 years old in such accidents:*

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FATAL INJURY 1994 33 4,809

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Age Groups Compared

Drivers 15-21 years old represent a small minority of those at the wheel in county fatal and injury accidents. An age-group comparison for 1994:

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FATAL INJURY 15-21 13% 16% 22-34 42% 37% 35-44 17% 19% 45-54 11% 12% 55 and older 14% 12% Not stated 3% 4%

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* The figures do not include passengers.

Source: California Highway Patrol

Researched by APRIL JACKSON/Los Angeles Times