Case against Batty getting hard to ignore

Dave Batty is on the hot seat again?

Pardon my nosiness, but what the hell is going on with this guy?

I opened my newspaper Saturday and read with amazement that Batty, now a 52-year-old retired Spokane firefighter, was booked into jail “on charges of felony drunken driving and possession of a controlled substance.”

Wait a minute. The last time I read a story about Batty he was offering spiritual guidance to families who lost loved ones in his second fatal car crash.

Prior to his arrest last week, Batty was best known for being involved in two lethal wrecks on the same highway.

Let’s start at the beginning. In 1993, Batty was convicted for being drunk as a skunk when he killed David Cole, a U.S. Forest Service employee, on U.S. Highway 2.

He came on my radar when I learned Batty was back at the Fire Department on a work-release program just 11 months after taking Cole’s life.

In 1995 the boneheads running the city hired the guy.

I’m all for giving people a second chance. But being a firefighter is not like being a plumber or a smart-aleck columnist. Firefighters are servants paid by the public. Like cops, they should be held to a higher moral standard. The job is to set an example and protect the people.

Hiring Batty was an insult to every firefighter who never got tanked, slid behind a wheel and sent some innocent soul to his maker.

All this viewpoint got me was a load of grief from the Batty protagonists who railed at me for attacking such a swell guy. Batty “is in the business of saving lives and you are in the business of selling newsprint,” huffed one letter writer.

Cut to 2007. Batty was on a medical furlough in January when the pickup he was driving on Highway 2 clipped the back of a van, causing a violent chain reaction.

The southbound van veered into the path of a northbound Toyota. When it was over, three men – Gregory Stueck, Kalen Hearn and Michael Edwards – were dead.

This time Batty hadn’t been drinking. Although investigators were initially suspicious about some medication the firefighter had been taking, a report concluded that he showed no signs of impairment at the time of the wreck.

The Spokane County prosecutor declined to pursue charges.

That was a bum move in my book. So what if Batty wasn’t impaired? Police believed that Batty’s action triggered a wreck in which three men died.

I say let a jury decide the question of culpability as we did with Clifford Helm. A jury found Helm not guilty last March for the vehicular deaths of five Schrock children.

That verdict stunk worse than an outhouse in July. But at least the case was tried. Or maybe we don’t always have the same prosecutorial zeal when a city official is involved.

There I go being a cynic again.

Whatever the reason, Batty caught a huge break. He retired from the Fire Department. He could fade away from the headlines and the controversy.

But now this: jailed on suspicion of felony drunken driving and possession of a controlled substance.

These are just charges, of course. For all I know Batty is innocent and this is yet another cruel stroke of bad luck.

If that’s not the case, I can’t help but wonder how the diehard Batty backers will try to spin it. Will they finally have had enough? Or will they keep blaming jerks like me for, as one writer said, “setting out to ruin a man”?

Oh, well. At least nobody died in Batty’s latest misadventure.

That’s progress, I guess.