Questions arise in deadly accidents

Consistency in charges sought

By John Coté
Staff Writer

July 2, 2005

The car was reduced to debris -- a door sheared off, the engine on fire, a wheel rolling down the street.

Kaitlin Kazanjian, 16, a passenger in the Acura coupe, was killed.

A visit to the crash scene was a key reason prosecutor Ellen Roberts said she decided to file a vehicular homicide charge against Carlos Pozo, then 17.

"My thought was, `If he's not going 80 miles per hour, I'll eat my hat,'" Roberts said, describing when she viewed the twisted metal from the Nov. 5, 2003, crash in Palm Beach Gardens. "I thought if we don't stop this kid -- he's already taken a life -- I just felt that he should be held accountable for it, and certainly the facts were there."

The case underscores the complex emotional and legal factors involved in fatal crashes, and has some questioning whether Palm Beach County authorities file criminal charges in such cases consistently.

A jury convicted Pozo last month of vehicular homicide, and he faces up to 15 years in prison. His sentencing is July 29.

The crash that killed Kazanjian, a sheriff's sergeant's daughter, was one of 238 fatal traffic crashes in Palm Beach County that year. Criminal charges were brought in 22 of them, according to Palm Beach County State Attorney's Office records.

In some notable high-profile fatal crashes since 2000, prosecutors cut plea deals or declined to file charges.

Another, the June 10 crash of a Caridad Health Clinic bus into a semitrailer truck that fatally injured 9-year-old Ronald de Leon, is still under review by the State Attorney's Office. Bus driver Luis Cabrera, 62, got $128 in fines for improperly changing lanes and not wearing a seat belt.

"If you look at all of the cases, a lot of times it's surprising when they file charges and when they don't," said Michelle Suskauer, Pozo's lead attorney. "I was pretty surprised that they wouldn't file charges against a school bus driver who ran a stop sign and killed somebody, and then my guy was speeding and they did file charges."

She was referring to school bus driver Maria Abrahantes, who sheriff's investigators say ran a stop sign Nov. 11, 2004, in The Acreage, causing a crash that killed passenger Diana Kautz, 15. Abrahantes was charged only with a traffic violation.

The difference in the cases, said Roberts, chief of the office's traffic homicide division, was the difference between negligence and recklessness. Recklessness was "along the lines of gross negligence," she said.

"Was [Abrahantes] negligent? Certainly," Roberts said. "She was not reckless. We're not talking excessive speed."

Under state law, a person must kill someone while driving "in a reckless manner likely to cause the death of, or great bodily harm to, another" to commit vehicular homicide.

"People run red lights, thousands a day, in Palm Beach County," Roberts said. "Most of the time they're going the speed limit. Some guy comes along doing 100 miles per hour, says `I'm going to run it' and he kills someone, then it no longer becomes negligent. It becomes gross negligence because of the speed."

Suskauer countered that her client, Pozo, did not run a stop sign and "everybody is capable of going over the speed limit and probably everybody does. That doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make it criminal," she said. "This was a terrible, tragic accident."

No drugs or alcohol were involved when Pozo's car flew off a road in the PGA National development. Witness testimony and evidence suggested he was going 70 to 90 mph on a 35 mph road. The defense contends he was speeding but not going that fast. Pozo told police he lost control while fiddling with a CD.

Roberts said she and two attorneys scrutinize the facts and evidence in each case to see if charges are warranted and if the case can realistically hold up in court.

"It's strictly and truly on a case-by-case basis," she said.

Victim's families are allowed input, but "their input is directly proportional to my evidence," Roberts said.

"If I have an exceptional case and no reason to go below the [sentencing] guidelines, and they want the guideline sentence, then I have no reason to go against them," she said. "If I don't have a good case, we'll bring them in here and try to work something out."

In Pozo's case, Kazanjian's family was reluctant to endorse anything less than a 10-year prison sentence, and Roberts said she didn't feel compelled to offer less. The defense rejected it.

Roberts extended a substantially more generous plea offer to Stacie Persin, a Boca Raton mother charged with vehicular homicide in the death of her daughter. Persin accepted a plea deal of five years' probation for the February 2000 crash that authorities said was caused by speeding on a wet road. Haley Bobrowsky, 8, was not wearing a seat belt.

Tests indicated Persin had no drugs in her system but had traces of a chemical produced by metabolizing cocaine, police reports said. That evidence would likely have been inadmissible at trial, Roberts said, leaving her with a mother driving a little too fast without her daughter in a seat belt.

"I'm going to have to convince that jury that she should be punished for killing her own daughter," Roberts said. "I had a hard enough time trying to convince them to convict Pozo."

Persin's ex-husband, Jacques Bobrowsky, who was opposed to her light plea deal, said prosecutors are overwhelmed with cases.

"They have to use plea bargaining as a tool," Bobrowsky said. "It's all over. I feel they use plea bargaining even when they have clear evidence to lighten their case load. And that shouldn't happen."

Shirley Bates, a Leon County traffic prosecutor, said prosecutors have to secure a realistic outcome given their evidence.

"Proof isn't always an easy thing to obtain," she said.

John Coté can be reached at jwcote@sun-sentinel.com or 561-832-6550.

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