Female Passenger, 78, Killed In DUI Crash
LOS ANGELES (CBS) — A 78-year-old woman was killed while a passenger in a car driven by an allegedly drunken driver, according to the CHP.
The victim was the lone traffic fatality in Los Angeles County during the first 84 hours of the four-day Thanksgiving holiday, the CHP said.
The woman was killed as a 1985 Oldsmobile Cutlass crashed on the northbound Harbor (110) Freeway approaching Redondo Beach Boulevard at 4:30 a.m. Saturday. The woman, who was not publicly identified, was pronounced dead at 8:28 a.m. Saturday at Harbor/UCLA Medical Center.
The driver of the Oldsmobile, James Eddie Bailey, 61, was reportedly drunk when he swerved the car to the right into a guardrail and a freeway sign pole. Paramedics took Bailey to the same hospital for treatment of minor injuries, then arrested him.
The lone death compares to six people killed in crashes in L.A. County during the same reporting period in 2010, according to CHP records. The 84-hour period began at 6 p.m. Wednesday and ended at 6 a.m. Sunday.
In Los Angeles County, CHP officers arrested 303 motorists on suspicion of drunken driving, a few more than last year's total of 276. Statewide, there were 1,350 drunken driving arrests, in comparison to last year's count of 1,419.
Statewide, 21 fatalities were reported. Last year, 12 people were killed in the comparable period.
The drunken driver figures tally only arrests made by CHP officers, and do not include hundreds of other police agencies up and down the state. The fatality total includes deaths investigated by all police agencies in California, and sometimes are low because of occasional delays by local jurisdictions in reporting fatal crashes to the CHP.
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