Elk Grove officer’s death in DUI crash is example of rising danger on California roadways
Tyler Lenehan was minutes away from pulling into Elk Grove Police Department’s station house to start the morning shift early on a Friday when he was killed on Highway 99 in Sacramento by a wrong-way driver suspected of being drunk behind the wheel.
The Jan. 21 tragedy deeply shook Elk Grove’s police force, rekindled the fears of the loved ones who see motor officers off to work each day and is a painful reminder of the dangers the officers face when they climb aboard their motorcycles.
“You’re just exposed,” said retired Bay Area motor officer Doug Wayne of life on motorcycle patrol. “You have to accept that at any time, it can happen to you. You just don’t dwell on it. Your job is safety. You’ve got a job to perform. The motorcycle is just another tool.”
The retired Oakland police motor officer and instructor is president of Municipal Motor Officers of California, the Glendora-based group made up of some 300 active and retired motorcycle officers across California.
Dwelling on the dangers, Wayne said, “is not in your mindset. Your mindset is that you’re going home at the end of your shift.”
But the death of the 44-year-old Lenehan, the first on-duty death in the department’s history, also shines a light on a disturbing trend: the dangerous and deadly rise in traffic collisions in Sacramento County and across California.
Motor fatalities up in county, state
About 237 people were killed on Sacramento County roadways from December 2020 through November 2021 — a dangerous 12-month stretch that saw traffic deaths jump 30% from the same period a year earlier, according to preliminary death certificate data from the state Department of Public Health.
That is twice the statewide rate over a similar 12-month period and the most in the county since at least 2015. The state health data researched by The Sacramento Bee does not break out collisions in which alcohol or drugs were involved.
Statewide, the California Highway Patrol reported a 15% increase in traffic deaths during a similar 12-month span from October 2020 to October 2021, according to data cited by the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office.
One of those killed was one of the Highway Patrol’s own: Andy Ornelas, 27, a motor officer for CHP’s Antelope Valley office north of Los Angeles. Ornelas, a four-year CHP veteran, died Dec. 2, 2020, of injuries he suffered in a traffic crash a week before while on patrol in Palmdale.
New federal data slated for release this week is expected to show the troubling traffic trend is a nationwide phenomenon as Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg launches a national strategy to combat traffic deaths, The Associated Press reported Thursday, as part of President Joe Biden’s infrastructure spending plan.
The numbers will show another increase in traffic deaths through the third quarter of 2021 and show a “sizable increase” in deaths compared to the same three-month period in 2020.
“I continue to be extremely concerned about the trend,” Buttigieg said during a briefing at the White House on Thursday. “Even through a pandemic that has led to considerably less driving, we continue to see more danger on our roads.”
In its extensive report last week on Bay area traffic collisions, Bay Area News Group reporters noted San Jose’s dramatic surge in traffic deaths: Eight deaths on San Jose streets already in 2022 after a 2021 in which 60 people were killed, a third of whom were pedestrians. Another victim of a 2021 wreck died last week from their injuries, according to the reporting.
Traffic safety advocates cited by Bay Area News Group chalked up the numbers of fatal collisions nationally to sharp increases in traffic flow during the pandemic and speeding and other careless behavior behind the wheel by drivers accustomed to clearer highways and freeways during the two-year-long contagion.
Officials at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration reached similar conclusions pointing to speeding and reckless driving for increases in traffic deaths during the pandemic, the AP reported.
Substance abuse a likely factor in crashes
But the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and health scholars say one of many tolls of the COVID-19 pandemic has been an increase in substance use, a factor prosecutors in the capital and state said may be contributing to the rise in deadly wrecks on California’s roadways.
According to the CDC, as of June 2020, 13% of Americans reported starting or increasing substance use as a way of coping with stress or emotions related to COVID-19.
Mandy Owens, a clinical psychologist and researcher at the University of Washington Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute, says she’s observed a spike in substance use that includes an increase in both quantity and frequency of drug use during the pandemic.
And though Wilson Compton, deputy director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse cautions against conflating all increased drug use directly with COVID-19, experts agree based on research and clinical observation that pandemic-related strains, from economic stress and loneliness to general anxiety about the virus, are a major driver for the increase.
“There’s sort of a perfect storm of factors that we know increase drug use,” says William Stoops, a professor of behavioral science, psychiatry and psychology at the University of Kentucky. “People are more stressed and isolated, so they make unhealthy decisions, including drinking more and taking drugs.”
Prosecutors alarmed by rise of cases
In December, just weeks before the wrong-way collision that took Lenehan’s life, district attorneys across the state sounded similar alarms about what was happening on roadways in their jurisdictions.
The prosecutors linked the rise in part to alcohol and drug use during a COVID-19 pandemic now entering its third year.
“What is really concerning for us here in Sacramento County is the significant increase in the number of vehicular manslaughter cases in which we’re talking about DUI fatalities where people have lost their lives,” said Sacramento County District Attorney Anne Marie Schubert in the December news conference highlighting the dangers ahead of the holiday season and New Year’s Day. “It’s critically important that folks understand that these are human beings,” Schubert said.
The evidence was stark: From 2017 to 2020, Sacramento prosecutors filed nine to 12 DUI vehicular and gross vehicular manslaughter cases each year, Schubert showed.
In 2021, that number rose to 27. Of those cases, 16 were filings of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated — when the driver or passenger of the vehicle that was struck was killed.
The 16 filings were nearly three times the number of such cases filed each of the previous four years. Schubert was joined virtually at the December news conference by district attorneys from El Dorado, Placer and Yolo counties along with top prosecutors from Fresno, Kern and San Diego counties. All spoke to the rapid rise in DUI deaths in their counties.
In smaller Yolo County, its five DUI vehicular manslaughter cases in 2021 were as many as in the previous four years combined — a number “dramatic and notable even for a county Yolo’s size,” said Yolo County Assistant Chief Deputy District Attorney Melinda Aiello.
Three weeks later, another suspected drunken driver claimed a life on Highway 99 near 47th Avenue.
This time, it was Lenehan.
Jermaine Jeryan Walton, 31, of Sacramento faces a murder charge and a second count of causing an accident resulting in death and failing to render reasonable assistance to Lenehan following the collision.
The murder charge was levied because Walton was convicted in 2017 of misdemeanor driving with a blood-alcohol level above .08. Walton remains held without bail in Sacramento County custody and returns March 7 to Sacramento Superior Court.
“The sad reality is that he was starting his day, enforcing laws to keep Elk Grove a safe place,” said John McGinness, the former Sacramento County sheriff who was a motorcycle officer.
A memorial service for Tyler Lenehan will be held Tuesday at Bayside Church Adventure Campus in Roseville. The Elk Grove officer will be laid to rest at a private ceremony at Green Valley Mortuary in Rescue.
This story was originally published January 31, 2022 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Elk Grove officer’s death in DUI crash is example of rising danger on California roadways."
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