After his crash killed a child, the DMV renewed his license

I’m CalMatters reporter Mikhail Zinshtein, and I’m filling in for Lynn today.

In late 2022, Kostas Linardos rammed a three-ton pickup truck at high speed into the back of a sedan, killing a toddler.

Placer County prosecutors, who charged him with vehicular manslaughter, already knew he had at least 16 traffic violations — including speeding, reckless driving and street racing — and was involved in at least four previous collisions before the fatal crash, court records show.

But they also learned that the DMV didn’t renew his license until a year after the DA’s office filed charges.

Prosecutors asked the DMV for help. They thought something he said at a hearing to get his license might help their case.

In the latest installment of our investigation into License to Kill, reporter Robert Lewis documents how the DMV refused to cooperate with the prosecutors.

The silence raised a key question: Did the DMV even investigate?

Lewis’s report shows that the DMV spent nearly a year struggling to keep the answer to that secret. When the matter finally went to court this year, the attorney representing the agency made a shocking admission:

The DMV had no records of an investigation into a longtime reckless driver who killed a 23-month-old boy. It appears the agency didn’t even hold a hearing before deciding it was okay for Linardos to stay on the road.

• Placer County District Attorney Morgan Geer: “There is either moral culpability or legal responsibility on them, and they actively seek to prevent it from being revealed.”

The DMV’s lack of cooperation underscores how little action the state is taking against deadly drivers.

State law authorizes the DMV to investigate drivers involved in a crash that kills or seriously injures someone, but agency records show the DMV rarely uses that power.

Data provided to CalMatters shows that from 2022 to 2024, the agency opened just 3,300 investigations of drivers for their role in a fatal or serious injury crash, a time when California reported nearly 56,000 such collisions.

Read this to Robert story here. and read the six-part License to Kill investigation here.