Elderly motorists face scrutiny due to recent car accidents

Until the day he died, Fred Schwartz was never able to resolve the hollow feeling that a part of his independence had been taken away from him.

“I don’t know if my father could have driven safely or could not have. I don’t know if the doctor was right,” recalls his son Nelson.

Fred, who most recently lived in Port Hueneme, was a World War II veteran who’d been a licensed driver since his teens. Like many senior citizens, by age 84, his physical and mental faculties had declined, and he relied on a walker for mobility. Sadly, his physician recommended to the Department of Motor Vehicles that Fred was no longer fit to drive a car, despite his spotless driving record.

The DMV revoked his license, and Fred devoted his energies to appealing the decision, even if it meant getting his license back just to have one in his hands. He took it to the county level; but by October 2008, all that came from First District Supervisor Steve Bennett’s response to Fred was a referral back to the DMV.

Six months later, Fred was still trying when he passed away in April, aged 85. His license was never reinstated.

“My dad was really upset about the doctor’s decision,” says Nelson. “Personally, I wasn’t.”

Nelson had just wanted his father to be safe, fearing he could be a dangerous risk on the road. His mother, who died last year, had given up driving 10 years earlier at age 75, by her own volition.

“For the last three or four years, the only time she went driving was when I went in the car with her, and I was kind of her driving instructor,” he says.

Other elderly drivers have not been as cautious, with tragic results. In 1998, a 96-year-old man behind the wheel, impaired by poor vision, struck a 15-year-old girl walking through an intersection in Santa Monica. It prompted then-Senator Tom Hayden to author legislation mandating that the DMV administer more stringent re-examinations for senior drivers, testing their cognitive and driving skills. Older motorists claimed age discrimination.

The senate bill, proposed as the Brandi Mitock Safe Drivers Act for the victim of the 1998 fatality, failed at the state level. The bill’s proponents may have looked at it as a missed opportunity when a senior driver plowed his car through an outdoor farmers market in Santa Monica, killing 10 pedestrians, in July 2003.

George Weller is 92 now and was eventually convicted on 10 counts of vehicular manslaughter. He mistook the accelerator for the brake pedal in the incident.

Two months ago, famed journalist Michael Sommer, 73, of Thousand Oaks and his ailing mother were struck and killed by an elderly motorist. And just last week, a 78-year-old woman allegedly made the same error with the gas and break pedals when she drove through the front window of an Oxnard hair salon. Luckily, both Irene Vanhook, the driver, and those inside the salon received no major injuries.

There have been too many accidents involving senior drivers for Mark Hiepler to ignore, he says. The Oxnard attorney has advocated mandatory behind-the-wheel retesting every 10 years for senior citizens, calling for legislation similar to the Hayden bill.

“Let’s do something real simple,” he says. “I was shocked when I found out you could be 100 years old and the last time you took a driver’s performance test was 84 years ago, when you were 16. Everybody can get by on a written test.”

Hiepler says the state needs better regulations, not to damn or discriminate against elderly motorists, but to protect them. He was prompted to take action after successfully representing the family of Glenn Garvin in a wrongful death lawsuit. Garvin, a Thousand Oaks dentist, was struck and killed on his bicycle in 2006 by a motorist in her early 80s.

“In the process, I looked at how many wrongful death cases and injury cases that had one common denominator,” Hiepler continued. “All the drivers were over 85.”

Hiepler also decided to take action because, like Nelson Schwartz, his own mother, at the time, was still driving in her late 80s. She later suffered a stroke, barring her from driving anymore. But the injury could have happened behind the wheel, causing another accident like those in Santa Monica.

California’s DMV has few rules regulating licensed drivers by age.

“We don’t really, by state law, define a driver by age. The only thing that happens is when a person reaches 70, they can’t renew their license by mail,” Steven Haskins, a public affairs officer for the DMV in Sacramento, said.

The DMV also keeps track of investigations of drivers and license revocations; there were 85,199 drivers re-examined last year in California, and 6,783 licenses rescinded in 2008. However, according to Hawkins, none of those are broken down into specific age groups to determine how many involved senior citizens.

Seniors can opt to attend one of several driver safety courses offered countywide by AARP.

At 69, Ralph Schwiesow, a volunteer instructor for the Camarillo class, is a senior citizen and acknowledges that operating a car becomes a greater challenge as one ages. Even the most alert and quickest motorists — Schwiesow knows one man who still drives at 95 — can have one critical lapse in judgment on the road.

“It’s basically to remind people that, hey, we’re getting a little older, and our reaction times aren’t what they used to be. Sometimes our hearing and eyesight aren’t as good as they used to be,” he says. The class, according to Schwiesow, is to “just bring them up to par on State of California regulations. Sometimes you need to jog their memory.”

Schwiesow also teaches nonconfrontational ways to broach the subject of retiring from driving for people concerned for their elderly parents.

“If your parents are to the point where they shouldn’t be driving, what’s the point I should be approaching that?” he asks them. “Talk to them with courtesy. Don’t go in with a threatening mode. Go in with a concerned mode. You’re letting them know how you feel that it would be better that perhaps they not drive.”

Although he continues his legal efforts, Hiepler says he is not optimistic about a legislative or governmental solution, and that education is the best current approach.

“I think we’re much closer to educating people,” he says. “Our biggest solution will be nongovernmental — have people more involved in their parents’ lives, sitting down and having the hard talk about not driving, and being safe.”   

paul@vcreporter.com