More than a year ago, a late-night high-speed chase ended on my front lawn. It was two members of the Beverly Hills Police Department pursuing a fellow of Vietnamese extraction who'd been out drinking. He was under the legal definition of drunkenness but he was also on probation for a previous drunk driving conviction and one condition of that probation was that he never imbibe even a drop of alcohol when operating a moving vehicle. The B.H.P.D. pulled him over for busted headlamps and, when they did, he panicked and took off, clocking somewhere between 70 and 80 mph on residential streets.
This is an incredibly dumb thing to do, even at two in the morning. I asked one of the officers what the odds are of someone actually getting away in such a situation. He said, "The only way it ever happens is if we hit someone — and even then, we had this guy's license number so someone would have nabbed him. His chance of getting totally away was close to zero." The chase ended with the car smashing into a wall around my house, as I reported in this news item last March.
In the thirteen months since, the hole has remained in my wall as I waited for the Wheels of Justice to deliver unto me just and proper recompense. Those are some slow wheels, I tell you. The fellow pled "Not Guilty" to about a half dozen charges that pretty much boiled down to "Driving Under the Influence of Incredible Stupidity." I asked the Deputy District Attorney, who was handling the case, on what basis the driver could possibly claim innocence. He replied, "I'm dying to hear this one, myself." Then he added that suspects sometimes do that, hoping for the million-to-one chance that the court docket will be so clogged with important cases that someone will offer a plea bargain.
No one did, and the driver was sentenced to a few weeks of jail time, a few months of CalTrans work and three more years of probation. Oh, yeah — and he had until today to pay me the $4300 it'll cost to undo the damage. This afternoon, on or about the last possible minute, he delivered a certified check to the Deputy District Attorney…whose name, by the way, is Peter Geisness. Mr. Geisness was everything you'd want in a situation like this — cooperative, responsive, responsible…and he ever dropped the check off here this evening, on his way home from the courthouse. He and his fellow Deputy D.A., Teresa DeCastro, did a fine job for me. I dunno if either of them will ever happen upon this website but if they do, they'll see my thanks posted here. Boy, am I glad that, apart from a load of construction work, this is over.