California’s Deadly Drunk Driving Failure

from Robert Lewis and Lauren HeplerCalMatters

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Masako Saenz didn’t just lose her 5-year-old son to a repeat drunk driver. Two decades later, the Sacramento mother lost her own life after being hit by a driver with a blood alcohol level twice the legal limit.

Her story is one of thousands that illustrate a stark and deadly turnaround in the state’s handling of DUI.

California was the birthplace of the modern anti-drinking movement in the 1980s. But over the past decade, alcohol-related road deaths have increased by more than 50 percent — an increase more than twice as steep as the rest of the country, federal estimates show.

To understand why so many people die again in fatal DUI crashes, we reviewed manslaughter and homicide cases filed across California from 2019 through early 2024. We also researched other states’ drunk driving laws and reviewed decades of state and federal traffic safety data.
The records reveal a condition that too often fails to distinguish between drivers who have made a dangerous mistake but learned from it and those who refuse to stop endangering lives. Drunk and drugged driving is now so common in car-centric California that drivers routinely rack up four, five, six DUIs. A woman in Fresno just got her 16th.

Here are the main takeaways from our investigation:

1. California has some of the weakest DUI laws in the country, allowing repeat drunk and drugged drivers to stay on the road with little punishment.

Here, drivers generally cannot be charged with a felony until their fourth DUI within 10 years, unless they hurt someone. In some states, a second DUI can be a felony.

Missed opportunities to prevent tragedies haunt the families of the dead. The driver who killed Sarah Villar while she was walking with her fiance in 2021 had already been convicted of drunken driving in 2018, 2019 and 2020 — all felonies — and had served just a few weeks behind bars before the fatal crash.

Villar’s parents buried her in her wedding dress.

“To the broken justice system that allowed this to happen — shame on you,” her father, Dave Villar, said in her eulogy. “If I walk out my front door on my porch today and shoot around my neighborhood every day until I kill someone, when will I be a threat to society? When will I be a danger to my community? I say it’s after the first shot. Our system says it’s after the last.”

2. The state reinstates the licenses of chronic drunk drivers faster than other states.

In California, you usually lose your license for three years after your third DUI. That’s compared to eight years in New Jersey, 15 years in Nebraska and a permanent retreat in Connecticut.

We found drivers with up to six DUIs who were able to get a California license.

3. Even when the state takes away their license, many drivers stay on the road for years – racking up more tickets or new DUIs – with few consequences until they end up killing.

One of the best ways to avoid punishment seems to be to simply skip court.

Sylvester Conway was arrested three times in Fresno County from 2019 to 2021 for driving under the influence but failed to appear in court. All three cases were opened with outstanding warrants when prosecutors said he drove drunk again in early 2022, flipped his car and killed his passenger.

4. Courts and lawmakers do not treat DUI deaths as violent crimes.

Intoxicated manslaughter is not considered a “violent crime.” But in a twist to state law, a DUI that causes “serious bodily harm” is — meaning a drunken driver who breaks someone’s leg could face more time behind bars than if they had killed them, prosecutors said.

The discrepancy came as a shock to Ryan Nazaroff, who decided to become a law enforcement officer after his younger brother died in a DUI-related crash as a teenager. Years later it happened again – his father was killed by a repeat drunk driver in 2022.

He learned that the female driver who killed his father will likely serve only a fraction of her 10-year prison sentence. Generally, someone convicted of a felony will serve two-thirds of their sentence behind bars; for a lesser offense it was only one-third, prosecutors said.

5. California has fallen behind with a simple solution that many other states have adopted: car draggers.

Ignition Interlock Devices, known as IIDs, are those automotive draggers that the driver must blow into to start the vehicle. In California, the devices prevented more than 30,500 drunken driving attempts in 2023 alone, state legislative reports say.

But unlike most states, California does not require drunk drivers to use the devices. MADD gave us an “F” in a 2022 national report on state ignition interlock laws.

State law does require the devices for repeat offenders — but records show even that isn’t enforced. According to a 2023 DMV report, judges in more than a dozen counties ordered breathalyzers for less than 10 percent of drivers convicted of a second DUI.

“They should be ashamed of themselves because how many deaths have they caused?” said retired state Sen. Jerry Hill, a Bay Area Democrat who wrote the existing law. “This is an abuse of power and authority.”

6. Despite the rising death toll, state leaders have shown little willingness to address the problem.

At the time he was trying to tackle drunken driving in the Legislature, Hill became alarmed by what he saw as a “soft approach” to DUI, where lawmakers and commission advisers were more concerned about inconveniencing drivers than preventing deaths.

Just this fall, California lawmakers rejected the latest of several bills that would have required anyone convicted of a DUI to use a breathalyzer in the car. To the state The Department of Motor Vehicles said he did not have the time or resources to fulfill it.

State data underscores the threat: Drivers with prior DUIs are involved in the majority of fatal and injury DUI crashes in California.

Melanie Sandoval was still a teenager in 1989 when she was convicted in Madera County of driving under the influence. She got her second DUI a few years later and the state took away her license.

She got her third a few years after that. And then her fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, 10th, 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th, and 15th.

In 2023, she pleaded no contest to her 16th DUI after crashing into the car of a retired Navy aviator named Kevin Bonstead. He acknowledges the government can only do so much to prevent people from making bad decisions, but Bonstead said he’s upset the court tried to release her only on probation.

“My biggest concern is the next time this happens, there could be children in the car. And it could kill them,” he said. “Or it can knock people over. All kinds of horrible things can happen. And it can lead to someone’s death.”

If that happens, he said, the state — lawmakers, law enforcement, the courts — will have blood on its hands.

“You have an opportunity to stop this,” Bonstead said.

Sergio Olmos.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and is republished under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives license.