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The Wed. re-ping, with a Howie Herald column

Age slows us all down except for licensed geezers

by Howie Carr / Boston Herald 10/17/07

Mrs. Jane Berghold, age 76, finally stopped giving interviews yesterday afternoon, a day after driving her 1991 Oldsmobile into Brockton Hospital and killing a 58-year-old doctor and a receptionist, and injuring four others.

Her son, Peter, was answering the phone at the family’s Rockland home. The cops took away the driver’s license of his mother, a former Ted’s Carpet Land employee, at the scene. But having no license means little these days. So I asked Peter Berghold, did he think his mother will drive again? He paused before answering.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know how that will play out.”

I’m sure this is a very sad time for the Bergholds as well as for the families of the dead radiologist and receptionist. But wasn’t this all very preventable, if the problem of elderly drivers hadn’t been allowed to get so far out of control?

“I tried to slow down and the car didn’t, it just kept going,” Mrs. Berghold told the Herald. I asked her son to elaborate.

“From her perspective she’s not quite sure what happened,” he said. “She was driving into the hospital parking lot, driving very carefully, she said, because she’d never been there before. She made a left turn into a parking space, and the next thing she knew she was in the hospital covered with broken glass.”

Why wasn’t her husband driving? Because he’s 81 and has stopped driving - which 600,000 elderly people do every year, although many more resist.

I know, old drivers don’t want to give up their car keys because too often the next step is the nursing home. Children don’t want to take away the Olds because that’s a good way to get written out of the will. The politicians are afraid to tighten the licensing restrictions because old people vote. Gerontologists don’t want to lose a customer - I mean, a patient. Cops on the scene may go easier on a weeping old-timer; ditto the clerks at the Registry when somebody shows up blind as a bat for the vision test.

Google the phrases “elderly drivers” and “death” some time and you’ll read the same news story over and over again. Certain phrases recur - “remorseful,” which is what the elderly driver always is. Then there are the “emotional pleas,” offered by the lawyers to keep their wrinkly clients out of the can. And most of the time, they work. Consider the 89-year-old who fatally mowed down 10 people at the Santa Monica Farmer’s Market.

Ten dead. Cause of accident: “pedal error.” The sentence: probation.

When they aren’t mistaking the gas pedal for the brake, they “become confused.” That’s from a British Columbia story about a 71-year-old who killed six pedestrians in August. “The next thing he knew,” the story went on, “people were lying on the ground.”

On Monday, in Bakersfield, Calif., an “elderly driver” was killed when she ran a stop sign and drove into the path of an 18-wheeler with the right of way. In Baltimore Saturday, an 81-year-old slammed into the rear of a stopped delivery truck, killing himself and the 24-year-old truck driver. In Muncie over the weekend, a 94-year-old unlicensed driver described by neighbors as “a terrorist behind the wheel” severely injured a moped rider. In 1993, at the tender age of 77, this guy took out another moped and sent two people to the hospital in a helicopter.

The elderly always ask why is everybody always picking on them, when it’s really those young whippersnapper teenagers with the backwards baseball caps running into trees at 3 a.m. and then having all their hoodlum friends set up a “memorial” with teddy bears and empty 40-ouncers and Marlboro hardpacks - those punks are the ones causing all the trouble, sonny, and don’t you forget it.

Actually, though, according to a recent study by Carnegie Mellon University and the AAA Foundation, the traffic death rate for those between 75 and 84 is the same as for teenagers. For drivers over 85, the fatality rate is quadruple that of teenagers.

Want some more? You can find hundreds of these yourself on the Internet. This is from West Nyack, N.Y., last month. At the Foster Grandparent program, a woman was killed when an 86-year-old volunteer parking her car suddenly hit the accelerator instead of the brake. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.

The 86-year-old said “I am very, very sorry” Not as sorry as her victim, though.

Did someone ask about the charges? There aren’t any. The incident was described by police as “an unfortunate accident.”

If you haven’t heard this one before, rest assured you’ll be hearing it again.