Witnesses In Lafayette Crash Case: BMW Was Accelerating at Time of Impact

The man standing trial for the death of a driver in a Lafayette car crash was behaving so strangely in the hours after the collision, a police officer told a jury today, that he even seemed to be flirting with her in the hospital.

David Caspillo, the suspect, was lying on a gurney outside the emergency room at John Muir Medical Center, where the officer said she questioned him about the details of a horrific accident in Lafayette earlier in the day.

"He seemed to be unaware that a major accident had occurred and people were hurt," Officer Zara Parrilla told the jury.  "He was acting like he was the host of a party and he was so happy, it was just weird.  I specifically remember him making a pass, something like, 'You're really pretty, Officer' or 'We should go out sometime.'"

Parrilla, a police officer for eight years, said it wasn't the apparent flirting that surprised her; it was the circumstances under which it had occurred.  She had been on duty in Lafayette that March afternoon in 2007 when the 911 call came in reporting a multi-car pileup in front of Acalanes High School on Pleasant Hill Road.  And she was the first officer to arrive at the scene, which she described as a "catastrophe."

She said she ran first to a mangled Mazda Miata, and one look inside told her the driver was obviously dead.  Next, she ran to help a man in the driver's seat of a silver BMW, the car that Caspillo was driving. 

"He was talking, breathing and alert," she said.  "He seemed shocked and startled as anyone would be who had been in an accident, nothing unusual."

Someone was in the passenger seat helping Caspillo, so Parrilla said she kicked into triage mode and moved on down the line to the next person in need, a woman in a red minivan who had been thrown by the impact of the accident from her seat into the cargo end of the van.  All tolled, seven vehicles had been damaged in the crash, and there was so much crying and confusion that it was impossible to address all of it without help from pedestrians, some of whom had witnessed the accident.

At the start of the trial on Tuesday, witnesses said they saw the BMW driving through stop signs and speeding on side streets before it plowed into a line of cars stopped at a traffic light.  The driver, Caspillo, never slowed down or even attempted to swerve away from the imminent collision, several witnesses said.

A paid expert for the defense said the physical evidence from the scene confirms accounts from various eyewitnesses who said the BMW not only did not swerve or brake before the crash; it was actually accelerating. 

"You have a car that's accelerating.  You have a good line of sight, and you've got no response from the driver.  I would say that's atypical," Rudy Degger told the jury today.  A former Lafayette police officer, Degger now works as a paid expert in all types of trials reconstructing traffic accidents. 

The front end of Caspillo's BMW was crushed.  Complaining of neck pain, he was transported to John Muir Medical Center, where he was held three days for psychiatric observation.

Lafayette officer Parrilla said the driver's behavior at the hospital that night was markedly different from at the scene of the crash.  He seemed unaware that people had been hurt, she said, adding under cross-examination that she opted not to tell Caspillo that a man had been killed in the crash.

Dale Zenor, 55, of Walnut Creek had been driving a Mazda Miata that was parked at the back of the line that day, taking the most severe impact of the crash, according to trial testimony.  The scene was so grisly that Parrilla said officers covered the wreckage entombing Zenor with a yellow tarp to "reduce the shock value" to onlookers until the coroner could arrive.

"I felt like if I told him someone had died that he (Caspillo) would get overly upset and not be able to give me a clear statement," she said.

When questioned by defense counsel during cross examination on Wednesday, she also noted that she had spent less than a minute with Caspillo at the scene and that she didn't know whether he had been given any drugs at the hospital.

A blood test confirms Caspillo was sober at the time of the crash, and his attorney, Dirk Manoukian, maintains that he was "legally unconscious" at the time of the accident and therefore unable to recognize the danger at hand.