NO SOLACE FOR MOM'S GRIEF: ALCOHOL KILLS SON, BUT LAW LIMITS LIABILITY

SUSANVILLE -- It has been a year and eight months since Vicki Gower found
her son's body, cold and still as stone, in his bunk bed early on a Sunday
morning.

Twenty months, and the pain is as raw as ever.

But her grief is not simply that of a mother who tragically lost a beloved
son at 18, at the precipice of adulthood.

It is compounded by the horror of believing he should have been saved, and
that the law blames no one for his death.

Not the adult man at whose home he and other underage partygoers drank too
much liquor. Not the other guests who saw him pass out that night. Not the
friends who, after checking his pulse and trying to shake him into
consciousness, lifted him into the back of a pickup truck, drove him home
and put him in bed instead of seeking medical help.

That night or early morning, while his mother and stepfather slept
upstairs, Reggie King died of alcohol poisoning and breathing impairment.

After nearly two years of investigations and depositions, Gower has been
told that the only person legally responsible for King's death was King
himself.

It is a conclusion a grieving mother cannot accept.

"The music has stopped for us," said Gower, who has maintained her son's
bedroom, complete with prom pictures and posters of scantily clad models,
in the same condition as the night he died. "Our lives will never be the
same. I want someone to stand accountable."

But largely because of a California law designed to protect bar and liquor
store owners from legal liability -- a law she wants changed -- Gower seems
to have run out of options.

The law was last amended in 1978 and holds that, if a person gets drunk and
hurts himself or others, the drinker and not the "social host" is
responsible for any deaths or injuries that result.

California's law makes no exceptions for people under the legal drinking
age of 21, such as Reggie King, even if the "social host" is an adult.
Thirty other states allow liability in such cases, according to Robert
Shearouse, director of public policy for Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The
advocacy group has long pushed for "hosts" to be held responsible for
furnishing excessive amounts of alcohol to guests, especially those under
age 21.

"This is a law that needs to be changed," said attorney Arthur Morgan of
Redding, who represented Gower in her lawsuit against other partygoers.
"This lady lost her kid and it was a tragedy, but the case had low value
because the social host law is so strong."

The best Morgan could do, he said, was negotiate a small settlement with
the insurance companies of nine defendants who attended the party on the
night King died. In accepting the settlement, Gower said, she refused to
sign a statement waiving responsibility of the partygoers in his death.

Now Gower is contacting state lawmakers and advocacy groups in an effort to
amend a law that she said sends the message that "my son's life was not
worth anything." So far, she has made little headway but vows to fight on.

"I want to know that he didn't die for nothing," said Gower, a petite woman
who is easily moved to tears at the mention of her son's name. "What I want
is for no other mother to stand in my shoes ever again."

Reggie King was a handsome and popular teen in Susanville, a Lassen County
town of 17,000 surrounded by national forestland. He lived with his mother
and her second husband, Robert Gower; the couple's daughter, Jaime; and
Vicki Gower's granddaughter, Ashlie. His passions were electronics, big
trucks and water sports.

Parents in the community said King was an impressive and responsible young
man with an engaging personality and goals for the future.

In the late summer of 1996, King was attending Lassen College, pursuing a
degree in law enforcement while working nights at a gas station. On many
weekends, Gower's home was filled with teenagers listening to music,
watching videos and swilling soft drinks until the wee hours of the morning.

"The phone rang constantly," Gower recalled as she sat at her dining room
table on a recent afternoon, surrounded by photograph albums, boxes of
legal documents and other remnants of her son. "Reggie was so full of life.
His presence was so powerful. He just lit up a room when he walked in."

Gower, who works in the records department of one of two state prisons in
the area, said her son drank "a beer or two" occasionally, though he
shunned hard liquor and rarely stayed out later than midnight. "He really
didn't need curfews," his mother said.

On the last day of his life, he went to a barbecue for a friend, came home
briefly and then went to a gathering at a home owned by Michael Kirack, a
family acquaintance a month short of his 24th birthday who operated a
construction company in town.

Accounts differ wildly as to what happened after that.

In court depositions last year, defendants disagreed on everything from how
many people attended the party at Kirack's house to who bought the tequila
that King drank. Some partygoers, who included high school students, said
King gulped the liquor in a drinking "contest" that Kirack captured on
videotape, but no tape has ever been found and Kirack has denied
encouraging King in any way. In fact, he said in his deposition, he was in
and out of the house, which is not his primary residence, that night and
had no idea that King was getting drunk until he saw friends helping him to
his truck.

Kirack declined to comment about what happened that night, citing through
his lawyer a "secrecy agreement" between parties in the case. But he said
in his deposition last year he was uncertain where King got the tequila he
drank that night.

Some partygoers said King and a friend found the tequila in Kirack's
kitchen cabinet and challenged each other to drink several large glasses as
others egged them on.

At some point in the evening, King passed out. In depositions, friends
describe being concerned enough about him that they took his pulse and
lifted his eyelids. But instead of calling for help or taking him to a
nearby hospital, they lifted him into the back of his pickup truck and
drove him home.

Dane Beterbide, who rode with King to the party that night, said in his
deposition that his friend was still "giggling" when they opened the front
door of his home and carried him inside. Documents show that others said he
lost consciousness at Kirack's house and never made a sound after that.

Beterbide said he and several other young people arrived at Gower's home
shortly after 11 p.m. They undressed King, laid him in bed on his side and
placed a garbage pail on the floor near his mouth in case he vomited during
the night. Beterbide said he then climbed into the bunk bed above King and
went to sleep, documents show.

Gower remembers hearing the teens come in some time before midnight and
assumed everything was fine, she said.

Her next memory is of Beterbide knocking on her bedroom door hours later,
announcing that Reggie was not breathing. She remembers her hysteria as her
husband told a 911 operator, "He's cold! He's cold!" and of the paramedics
taking her son's lifeless body away.

Susanville police investigated King's death and turned their file over to
the Lassen County District Attorney's Office. No criminal charges were ever
filed.

Gower then pursued a "wrongful death" civil case. The lawsuit accused nine
partygoers of negligence for placing him in the back of the pickup truck,
possibly in a position that blocked his airway, and failing to call for
medical help. It also accused them of conspiracy in moving him from
Kirack's house because they "did not want to be caught or charged for
having a party where minors and adults were consuming alcohol."

But her lawyer became convinced, he said, that "no jury in Lassen County
would convict" the defendants on those charges. "I absolutely thought
someone should be held liable," said Morgan. "But there was no way we were
going to be able to win it so we had to settle," with none of the
defendants admitting guilt.

Gower said she got less than $25,000.

"It's a pittance," she said. "There is no accountability. And without
accountability, how many times will it happen again? Where's the justice?"

Beterbide's father, Jack, said his son has been devastated by his friend's
death. "It was a huge dose of reality for all of these kids. Dane had a
hard time grasping that it actually happened," he said.

"But the bottom line is that Reggie drank too much, way too much. To try to
affix blame to someone else for that makes no sense to me."

The Shasta County coroner, who does forensic work for Lassen County,
concluded that acute ethanol intoxication was the underlying cause of
King's death. His blood alcohol level was 0.32 percent, four times the
amount that legally renders someone drunk. Dr. Harold Harrison also
concluded that King's body was positioned in the truck or bunk bed in such
a way that it disrupted his breathing and hastened his demise.

Harrison, who received King's body several days later, was unable to
pinpoint a time of death. But in an interview, the coroner said King "very
definitely" could have been saved had he received medical attention shortly
after he passed out.

"If he had, at this early point in time, been taken to an emergency room he
would have been resuscitated," he said. "It's an unbelievable tragedy."

Beterbide said he considered getting outside help for King after he passed
out but never thought his condition was potentially critical.

"The majority of people that pass out when they are drunk wake up just
fine," he said in his deposition. "I figured we would be joking about it in
the morning."

In hindsight, Jack Beterbide said, "it is crystal clear" what should have
happened that night.

"Running to the hospital would have been the best of all worlds," he said.
"But these kids did the best thing they could think of at the time. They
took Reggie home and hoped he would sleep it off."

Copyright 1998 The Sacramento Bee

Checked-by: Mike Gogulski