C-Note Devalues Young Life

A hundred bucks. Chump change in today’s economy.

With luck and some imagination, a C-note will feed a family for a week. It might even buy a modest night on the town.

But on Monday in a Colville courtroom, $100 was the price the law put on a young mother’s life.

Her name was Sarah Louise Larsen.

She was 19. She had red hair and a baby boy named Dylan. She was athletic and good-humored and had everything to live for.

Until the afternoon of Oct. 23, 1997. That’s when an 81-year-old California man made a horrific, irreversible mistake.

His name is Gerald Ellsworth Johnson.

The northbound Mercury he drove veered out of its lane a few miles south of Colville on U.S. Highway 395.

Johnson was on his way to see his son. Larsen had just finished doing her laundry at her mom’s house. She was headed for home when she pulled over to pick up a hitchhiker.

Larsen was legally parked off the fog line when the heavy Merc plowed into the rear of her car.

The hitchhiker, Patrick Lippert, 19, suffered neck and back injuries. Sitting in the driver’s seat, Larsen was hurled into the windshield with the force of a catapult. She died later in a Spokane hospital.

After a police investigation, Johnson was cited for second-degree negligent driving.

That’s the same infraction a rambunctious teenager might earn for peeling out at an intersection. Or spinning doughnuts in a parking lot.

The Ukiah, Calif., man didn’t even have to attend Monday’s court preceding. A relative stood in for him and paid the measly fine.

Thank you, ma’am. Next case!

Even some of the courthouse clerks shook their heads over this one. But under Washington’s traffic code, Johnson committed no crime.

To warrant vehicular assault or a vehicular homicide charge, he would have had to have been drugged up, drinking or driving with a reckless disregard for human safety.

Johnson was doing none of those things. His driving record was spotless.

He simply wasn’t paying attention.

No other explanation accounts for what happened. According to police reports, the weather was good. The road was dry. There was plenty of light.

“It’s a tragedy all the way around. I don’t know what the answer is,” said Washington State Patrol Lt. Bruce Clark. The law “may not seem right or fair, but we’re stuck with it.”

Maybe it’s time the law was changed.

Shouldn’t there be a different degree of legal consequence for, say, someone who drives negligently and ruins a mailbox and someone who drives negligently and ruins a life?

There are monetary remedies available through lawsuits, of course, but shouldn’t there be more?

Nobody wants to see an 81-year-old man go to jail, but certainly his record needs to be stained with something more serious than a $100 fine.

Parking in a handicapped zone will tap your checkbook more than that.

“It’s like having the judicial system slap you in the face,” said Larsen’s mother, Jan. “Nobody ever prepares you for something like this.”

This is the same sad scenario that happened last year to my neighbor and friend, Cooper Jones.

The 13-year-old boy was riding legally in a sanctioned bicycle race when Glenna Ward, 66, smashed him with her Cadillac. It took Cooper a week to die. Ward was fined $250 for her second-degree negligence.

Another life of promise wasted.

After I reminded Johnson who Sarah Larsen was, he expressed sorrow for what had happened.

“She was 19? Oh, my God,” he said over the telephone. “The shame that things have to happen. You can’t undo it. I would love to undo it, but you just can’t.”