They were convicted of killing with their cars. No one told the California DMV

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California courts have failed to report hundreds of vehicular manslaughter convictions to the state’s Department of Motor Vehicles over the past five years, allowing roadway killers to improperly keep their driver’s licenses, a CalMatters investigation has found.

Marvin Salazar was convicted in May 2023 for killing his 18-year-old friend Joseph Ramirez, who was in the passenger seat when Salazar gunned his car, lost control and slammed into a tree, court records show. Under California law, the state should have taken away Salazar’s driving privileges for at least three years.

But the Los Angeles County Superior Court didn’t report the conviction to the DMV. Two months later, the agency issued Salazar his most recent license. Since then, he’s gotten two speeding tickets and has been in another collision, records show. 

“How can he keep driving?” said Gaudy Lemus, Ramirez’s mother. “We wanted consequences for him. Remove his driver’s license.” 

LA court officials belatedly reported the manslaughter conviction to the DMV last month, after CalMatters discovered the failure and asked about the case. It was only then that the state sent Salazar a notice revoking his driving privileges, records show.

CalMatters uncovered the error and others like it by cross-checking convictions in vehicular manslaughter cases against motorists’ DMV records, as part of an ongoing investigation. Earlier this year, we reported that the agency routinely allows drivers with horrifying histories of dangerous driving — including fatal crashes, DUIs and numerous tickets — to continue to operate on our roadways. 

But this isn’t just a DMV issue. Reporters identified about 400 cases from 2019 to 2024 in which the drivers’ convictions weren’t listed on their driving records, largely because the courts failed to report that information. The review wasn’t comprehensive; records were unavailable or incomplete in a number of counties.

In Los Angeles, about one-third of all convictions in manslaughter cases we identified were missing from drivers’ records. In Santa Clara County, it was half. We found no missing convictions in Orange County.

In response to our questions, 32 county courts so far have reported more than 275 missing convictions to the DMV. As a result, nearly 200 drivers who’ve killed have had their driving privileges suspended or revoked, updated DMV reports for these drivers show. While some already had a separate license suspension, 70 appear to have had a valid license before the agency took action in response to our reporting.

County courts, law enforcement and the DMV have a long history of poor communication that dates to the days of paper records. Today, court administrators blame the breakdowns on a mix of human error and technological bugs.

Chris Orrock, a spokesperson for the DMV, said the agency sends out revocation and suspension notices “as soon as we’re notified.” 

Even without a conviction, the DMV does have the discretion to strip a driver of their license for a fatal crash. We reported earlier this year that the agency often doesn’t use that power.

But in many cases, there is no discretion. State law, for example, requires the agency to revoke a driver’s license for at least three years after a felony vehicular manslaughter conviction.

As a result of the delayed reporting by the courts, some drivers could end up losing their licenses for far less than three years. That’s because the DMV typically enforces the sanction from the date of the conviction, not the date the court communicates it to the agency. 

Salazar’s current driving record shows him eligible to reapply for a license next spring — three years after his conviction but just a year after records show the state took action to revoke his driving privileges. 

His attorney declined to comment on his driving record but said Salazar did everything the court required.

For Lemus, the months after her son died in Salazar’s car were a blur. The loss was haunting, coming just as the teenager had decided to pursue a career building tiny homes for the homeless. 

She started having such bad panic attacks that she moved to a new city and switched jobs, unable to bear the drive to work through the intersection where the crash occurred. Her 25-year-old daughter still refuses to drive at all.

Lemus said she didn’t initially want Salazar to go to prison, “because it was an accident.” Now, she wonders whether that was a mistake. 

“I don’t want another family to go through whatever we went through,” Lemus said. 

A series of errors leads to reporting failures

State law has long required courts to report vehicle-related convictions to the DMV, including for speeding, DUI and vehicular manslaughter. The agency then puts the violations on a motorist’s driving record and, if necessary, suspends their license.

Last month, CalMatters reporters sent hundreds of names and case numbers to dozens of courts throughout the state and asked why convictions from vehicular manslaughter cases didn’t appear on drivers’ records. Most courts responded to questions quickly, thanked us for telling them, acknowledged the mistake and indicated that they would report the convictions to the DMV.

“They were errors on our part. I’m not going to sugarcoat it,” said Tara Leal, the court executive officer in Kern County, where we found 22 missing convictions.

In many counties, court staff simply neglected to send the information to the DMV.

Court clerks typically enter convictions into a case management system. Many courts use a system that has a tab for them to click on to transmit the information to the DMV.

Vehicle code violations like speeding tickets and DUIs clearly need to go to the DMV, court officials said. But most penal code violations, including offenses like robbery and assault, do not. Vehicular manslaughter is a penal code violation.

Heather Pugh, the Yuba County Superior Court executive officer, confirmed that her court should have reported conviction information to the DMV for eight cases CalMatters flagged. “To address that, we will reach out to the DMV to provide training to our staff on reporting requirements,” she said. “Additionally, we have instituted manual reviews of reportable non-vehicle code convictions to ensure they have been properly reported.”

Similarly, Fresno County’s director of court operations, Vidal Fernandez, acknowledged “the element of human error” in his court not reporting a half-dozen convictions in recent years. After realizing the problem, he said, staff checked further back, to 2015, identified an additional 17 cases and sent those convictions to the DMV as well.

Other counties have their computers essentially programmed to send conviction information to the DMV when clerks update the disposition information on a case, in theory taking human error out of the equation. But in response to questions from CalMatters, some administrators discovered that the programs were missing certain codes and had failed to function as intended.

“Ultimately it’s our responsibility,” said Jake Chatters, the court executive officer in Placer County, where a coding issue kept the court’s system from reporting two manslaughter cases.

In other courts, convictions were apparently reported, but there was some mistake in the information sent — like an incorrect birth date or a missing digit in a license number — and the DMV kicked the report back with an error message. Administrators said clerks are supposed to fix any errors and resubmit the information to the DMV, but in some cases that didn’t happen.

The result of the patchwork process is that even convictions from some of the most high-profile traffic deaths in recent years were missing from drivers’ records.

A deadly street race that grabbed international attention 

Ricardo Aguilar was racing his Dodge Challenger Hellcat in South Los Angeles one December afternoon in 2021, according to the Los Angeles Times, when he struck and killed a pedestrian — Arian Rahbar, a 21-year-old USC student and aspiring medical researcher.

Rahbar’s father, Sam, summarized the void left by his only child. “Without Arian, life as we know it has ceased to exist,” he told a judge.

The story made global headlines amid a spike in traffic deaths in Los Angeles and other California cities. Aguilar was convicted of felony vehicular manslaughter in 2023, court records show. But until a few weeks ago, that was never reflected in his state driving record.

In the section of his DMV report where collisions and traffic violations are supposed to show up, there was instead this message: “NONE TO REPORT.”

His driver’s license was still listed as valid.

It was only in May, after CalMatters asked the LA court for an explanation, that officials reported his and more than 100 other convictions to the DMV as required. Aguilar’s license is now listed as revoked.

Aguilar’s attorney did not respond to requests for comment.

Rahbar’s friend and former high school tennis teammate Ashwin Yedavalli was saddened and frustrated all over again to learn about the court error that allowed Rahbar’s killer to keep his license. 

Yedavalli, now 25, lives in Long Beach and still stops by the crash scene when he’s nearby. He helped organize a tennis tournament in his friend’s memory, and he said it’s unfair that the legal system failed to deliver on fundamental consequences for his death.

“It’s basically been brushed off,” Yedavalli said. “What about Arian’s life and legacy?”

A decades-long failure to communicate

This is not a new problem.

In the early 1990s, the California DMV was so concerned about getting timely and accurate reports from courts and law enforcement that it produced an educational video called “The Traffic Citation Trail.”

Frank Zolin, the agency’s director at the time, sat behind a desk wearing a crisp suit and chunky glasses, his silver hair swept to the side, to deliver the film’s key message: “We cannot achieve traffic safety without effective teamwork between local law enforcement, the courts and DMV.” 

The film goes on to tell the fictionalized story of a reckless young driver who is able to avoid a license suspension because a ticket wasn’t reported to the DMV. In an early scene, the young man rushes to the mailbox to intercept a letter from the agency before his parents can see it.

“They told me four tickets means bye-bye license. There’s only three tickets here,” the driver says in surprise as he reads a warning letter from the state. “The one I got more than a month ago isn’t even here. … It’s party time tonight.”

In a tragic, real-life twist, the actor who played the motorist was killed by a drunken driver more than a decade later. And communication continued to be an issue. 

Robert Bullock worked at the DMV for more than three decades. In that time, he said, drivers would sometimes come in wanting to know whether they could renew their license, despite a conviction.

“We’d pull up the record and it wasn’t there,” said Bullock, who retired in 2019. He said he would tell them, “The court has screwed up, and you kind of got a freebie.”

Technology has, of course, improved from the era of grainy ’90s videos. Back then, police drove boxy sedans and held walkie-talkies the size of bricks. DMV clerks picked through mounds of paper forms, copying information into clunky gray computers with white text on black screens.

Today, at courthouses equipped with online records and modern digital tools, some administrators said they’re upgrading to a new case management system that should ensure conviction reporting is automated. Others said they’re going to do more training and manual checks to make sure the information is sent to the DMV.

In Los Angeles — one of the nation’s biggest county court systems, where we sent a list of 150 convictions that appeared to be missing from driver records — administrators declined an interview request. Instead, they emailed a statement from Rob Oftring, the court’s chief communications and external affairs officer: 

“The Court continues to work expeditiously to identify ways to ensure the successful electronic transmittal of all abstract of judgments to the DMV from its case management systems. This includes additional manual checks to identify in advance technical issues that prevent an abstract from being sent to the DMV. This also includes ensuring all criminal courthouse locations timely process their queues for transmittal and additional mandatory training for court staff.”

A trail of disappointment

For someone like Angie Brey, who’s had to confront a system that often treats deadly crashes as accidents rather than crimes, the promises of change sound hollow.   

She lost her partner and the father of her son, Gregory Turnage, on Mother’s Day in 2021. That’s when wealth manager Timothy Hamano drove onto a sidewalk and hit the 41-year-old Turnage, according to records prosecutors filed in court. Hamano had been drinking beer on the golf course and a bloody mary at lunch in San Francisco before the crash, his wife later told police. 

Hamano pleaded no contest to felony vehicular manslaughter and hit-and-run early last year. He received virtually no time behind bars after getting credit for wearing an ankle monitor at home while the case was open. The conviction should have prompted the state to revoke Hamano’s license, but the Alameda County court didn’t report it.

“They essentially let him get away with murder, in our minds,” Brey said. “The fact that they didn’t even take away his license … is just mind-blowing.” 

A spokesperson, Paul Rosynsky, said the Alameda court reports hundreds of criminal convictions to the DMV every month, but he acknowledged that staff had missed sending two for manslaughter in recent years, including the Hamano case.

Hamano’s license appears to have been valid as recently as May 7, when DMV records show he got in another collision. (The records don’t detail who was at fault or the severity.) 

The agency sent Hamano a notice on May 28 that his driving privileges were revoked, following CalMatters’ inquiries.

Hamano’s attorney, Colin Cooper, said his client “is traumatized by what he did” and will never forgive himself. Hamano didn’t drive while the case was open and drove afterward only because he had a valid license and insurance, Cooper said. Hamano stopped driving after getting the revocation letter from the DMV, he said. 

Brey said holding drivers accountable for death is the least the state can do. She said she worries every day, when their son has to cross a busy intersection to get to school, that history will repeat itself.

“If somebody can come up on the sidewalk and kill my partner,” she said, “it just makes me really scared for my son.”

Court research by Robert Lewis, Lauren Hepler, Anat Rubin, Sergio Olmos, Cayla Mihalovich, Ese Olumhense, Ko Bragg, Andrew Donohue and Jenna Peterson.

This post was originally authored and published by Lauren Hepler and Robert Lewis from Cal Matters via RSS Feed. Join today to get your news feed on Nationwide Report®.