Drunk Drivers Given a Grim Object Lesson

One morning three years ago Steven Evangelisti and several young friends drove down to Rosarito Beach for the day. As do many visitors to Baja, they drank. And drank. And that night on their way home, the driver of the car Evangelisti was riding in crashed into the center divider on the San Diego Freeway. Evangelisti, riding in the passenger seat, slammed into the windshield.

Today, Evangelisti spends his days--and nights--lying in a bed at Western Neuro Care Center in Tustin. He is fed through a tube into his stomach; another tube runs into his bladder and yet another tube moves the spinal fluid out of his brain.

Evangelisti is now 24 years old. His eyes move, but he probably does not see. He is incapable of communicating, and, although he responds to sound, he probably does not understand what is being said.

“He’s in what we call a vegetative state: You’re alive, but that’s it,” said Dr. Richard Selby, a consulting neurologist at the hospital.

Selby looked down at Evangelisti, who shifted in his hospital bed, his hands curled close to his chest.

“He’s been this way three years, and there is little chance he will make a significant recovery,” Selby quietly said, then added: “This is quite shocking for any lay person to see.”

That’s precisely the point Selby wants to drive home to participants in a program that he initiated last year in conjunction with Western Neuro Care Center and the Orange County Municipal Courts in which some first-time offenders arrested for driving under the influence are ordered to serve 10 or more hours of community service at Western Neuro Care Center.

The program is used at the judge’s discretion in addition to other terms of probation which could include a jail sentence, a fine or driving restrictions.

Because Western Neuro Care Center is a relatively small facility and cannot accommodate a large number of offenders at any one time, the program is primarily being used by the courts for younger or aggressive drivers who are not yet considered to be alcoholics. To date, about 35 offenders have been ordered to do community service at the facility.

At the center, the offenders’ duties consist mainly of helping deliver supplies to the rooms. Some also may read letters to patients or help the activity director work with the “higher-level” brain-damaged patients.

But it’s not what they do at the center that is important. It’s what they see: the havoc that driving under the influence could not only inflict upon themselves but on others. The point is to literally shock them into thinking twice about ever drinking and driving again.

At Western Neuro Care Center, about 70% of the patients are head trauma victims as a result of drug- or alcohol-related accidents.

“I think it (seeing the patients) makes an impact on anybody that walks into this facility, particularly if you give them those figures,” administrator Sharon Lucas said.

Lucas believes that the community service program has been good not only for the drunk-driving offenders but for hospital staff.

“When you work with this kind of patient population it can be routine,” she said, adding that the offenders’ presence at the facility “makes you aware of how many patients we take care of are here because of drunk driving.”

“As a physician dealing with trauma,” Selby said, “we see daily the devastation that alcohol-related accidents inflict on people and not only on the injured people but the family too.”

Brain-Damaged Woman

Over the years, Selby has seen hundreds of cases such as Evangelisti’s or the 22-year-old woman patient who went out drinking with her girlfriends one night and ended up severly brain-damaged after the car she was riding in ran into the back of a truck on the San Diego Freeway.

“About a year ago, while admitting a patient, I just got so upset and depressed,” Selby said. “I felt there must be something I could do personally to see if we can’t let people who drink and drive understand the consequences not only to themselves but to other human beings, and that’s when we got the program started.”

Selby approached Municipal Judge James P. Gray of the Central Orange County Judicial District.

As Selby discovered, Gray was “the right judge at the right time.”

Indeed, when Gray was appointed judge in 1983 and took over the arraignment calendar for all out-of-custody drunk-driving defendants, he admits, “I didn’t know the first thing about drunk drivers.”

But, he said in an interview, after “seeing all these high blood-alcohol readings, I was appalled.”

Confronted then with what he considered “the most severe problem area” faced by his court--Central Court alone averages more than 200 drunk-driving cases a month--Gray began to investigate what could be done other than “simply to move the cases along.”

Gray estimates that at least 40% of the DUI (Driving Under the Influence) offenders who go through the court are alcoholics: high-risk problem drinkers for whom being arrested, paying a heavy fine and going through the court process does little to cure the disease itself.

As a result of a six-month study that included discussions with medical doctors and others who specialize in the study of alcoholism, Gray and a majority of Orange County judges in late 1984 initiated a program for screening and sentencing of first-time DUI offenders.

Court Offers Choice

Those who are considered to be high-risk drinkers--as determined by a screening process conducted by the county Probation Department--are “given the option of either serving a sentence of at least 10 days in jail and losing their license for at least six months or by showing by their actions that they are good risks for not doing this again,” Gray explained.

Such actions, Gray said, “would be to successfully complete an intensive nine-month program of alcohol counseling, including a medical examination; three meetings per week of Alcoholics Anonymous and individual and family counseling, as well as a monitored program of antabuse (a chemical that reacts violently with alcohol).”

Gray estimates that “at this moment, 60% of those who opted for the (nine-month) program have completed it successfully and as far as we know are no longer drinking alcohol. Some of the others found it too intensive and came back to court requesting the first sentence (jail).”

Thus committed to doing more than merely moving the drunk-driving cases along, Gray said he jumped at Selby’s idea of having the courts order select first-time DUI offenders to do community service at Western Neuro Care Center.

“It seemed to me like a natural,” Gray said. “It’s got to be a sobering experience in both senses of the word.”

Gray lauds Selby as an example of those private citizens, such as members of Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD), who are responding out of pure “desperation” to do what they can to combat the problem.

“Because the disease (of alcoholism) is so individualized, it’s hard to know what will actually get through to a defendant,” Gray observed. “It might be Alcoholics Anonymous; it might be a medical doctor telling him his liver is giving out by drinking, or it might be a program such as the one instituted by Dr. Selby.”

Program Made Its Point

The program apparently got through to Jeff (not his real name), a 20-year-old Newport Beach college student.

He was ordered to do 40 hours of community service after being arrested for driving under the influence of alcohol at 8 in the morning. He had been drinking “mostly beer” over a six-hour period the night before. “I had slept a little bit and thought that I might be OK, but I wasn’t,” he said.

Although his arrest convinced him “there was no way I’d ever do that again,” he said his time spent at Western Neuro Care Center “made a big impact” on him.

“It was a pretty eye-opening experience walking into the first room--it was like a slap in the face,” said Jeff, who divided his 40 hours up into two- and four-hour visits because, he admits, “I couldn’t stay in that place eight hours” at a time.

But while he was “pretty much shocked” when he saw his first patient, it was another patient who made the greatest impact on him.

“The time it really hit me . . . I was in one of the rooms and I saw this picture on the wall of this really cute girl and her family, and I looked down at her and she was just on the life-support machine. . . . That was the clincher right there: That could be me.”

Currently, only a handful of Orange County judges are sending select first-time DUI offenders to Western Neuro Care Center as a term of probation, but Selby recently spoke to a group of judges “to make sure each of them had knowledge of the program so they could utilize it.”

Selby, who described the community service program as so far being “very low key,” believes that it’s time to start expanding it to other facilities.

Although some judges have ordered offenders to put in 40 and even more hours at the facility, Selby feels that the number of hours should be reduced to five per person so that more people can participate. Selby said: “I think within a few hours they get the message.”

Municipal Judge Robert E. Thomas, also of Central Court, has been using the program as a term of probation for more than a year.

“It’s a good idea because it brings the problem created by the drinking driver to a level he can equate with because he’s confronted by people who have been injured by such activities,” Thomas said. “It’s a real eye-opener, and it no longer makes the statistics just cold hard facts.”

“I think,” Selby said, “if we just turn a few of these people around then it (the program) is meaningful and we’ve accomplished something.”