Our protagonists are not without blame. But the baby was 9 months old, the husband was off to war in Iraq and the wife somehow overlooked the simple fact that her debit card number had changed.

Sherri Hutton kept driving Orange County’s toll roads, her FasTrak beeping – unaware that it was no longer linked to any bank account.

And so the violations piled up. For six months. More than a decade ago. Each pass through the toll plaza digging the hole deeper – and she passed through toll plazas more than 300 times.

With penalties and late fees, the bill ultimately exceeded $49,000.

There have been wage garnishments. Seizures of money from her bank account. The Toll Roads has recovered $10,765, plus a $5,000 credit she won by joining a class-action lawsuit against the Toll Roads alleging constitutionally excessive fines back in 2010.

So the Toll Roads recouped nearly $16,000 for what would have been about $2,000 in tolls had the transponder been configured properly, Hutton figures. An extremely expensive lesson, but one she thought had ended five years ago.

She was wrong. Lawyers for the Toll Roads are back in court, trying to collect the remaining $31,450 they say Hutton owes. So far, they are not amenable to compromise.

“I am gobsmacked by this,” said Catherine F. Lukehart, the Santa Ana attorney who stepped in last month when Hutton appealed to the Orange County Bar Association for help.

“She will never ever be able to repay this.”

Attorney Richard Marshack, whose Marshack Hayes LLP specializes in bankruptcy law, is outraged. “Here’s a woman with three kids, whose husband is active-duty military,” he said. “A $49,000 Toll Roads violation? That’s just crazy – absolutely crazy. Toll Roads penalties are just unconscionable. The law needs to be changed to prevent this.”

In court papers, the Toll Roads argues that Hutton’s fines grew so large because she failed to respond to dozens of notices and made no voluntary payments on the judgment.

The Toll Roads said it couldn’t comment on the specifics of this case, but welcomed the opportunity to explain its processes in general.

“Violation notices typically get a customer’s attention, allowing us to resolve the issues and reinstate those accounts,” Toll Roads CEO Mike Kraman said by email. “In rare instances, we encounter truly egregious violators who do not respond and resist all of our efforts to resolve their unpaid tolls.

“Since the tolls collected go towards paying off the debt incurred to build the roads, we must be a good steward of the public trust and we do pursue payment from these habitual violators. These efforts include taking the matter all the way to civil judgment; however, these cases are rare.”

Here, then, is a tortured tale of toll road torment – and a warning to us all.

THE BEGINNING

Hutton has an easy laugh, which has come in handy lately. She grew up in Capistrano Beach, works in human resources administration and met her husband in San Clemente shortly after he returned from deployment in Japan.

Michael P. Hutton – now a master sergeant in the Marine Corps, who served two tours of duty in Iraq and two tours in Afghanistan – grew up as the only boy in a household with four sisters. Chivalry didn’t die with him, said his wife: He’s an old-fashioned kind of guy, patriotic, passionate, a hard worker with a big heart. She had two sons from a previous marriage, and he embraced them as his own.

They married in 2002. Their son was born in January 2005. Michael Hutton deployed to Iraq that September, and the toll fiasco began in October. Hutton was juggling a full-time job, three children, volunteer duty as liaison to some 700 military families and a recent move to San Juan Capistrano, solo.

She wanted to minimize change for the kids, so kept her eldest son in Aliso Niguel High School rather than enroll him closer to their new home. She used a toll road to get to Aliso Viejo, then to work at Mutual of Omaha in Irvine, where she was an administrator in the group benefits department, and back again. There were often four tolls a day.

The Toll Roads mailed dozens of violation notices to various addresses it had for Hutton, it says in court paperwork. One address was correct, she said, but she doesn’t remember seeing any of them.

In 2006, the Toll Roads petitioned the court for a $29,900 judgment against Hutton. All it had to do was file proof – its own accounting of the violations.

When someone files a regular old lawsuit against you for $29,900, you’re served in person. But when an agency files a $29,900 judgment against you, you’re notified by mail. Again, Hutton said she never saw any such notice.

THE MIDDLE

The first she learned about it was in 2007, when a wage garnishment notice was delivered by sheriff’s deputies to her Mutual of Omaha office in Irvine, she said. She called the Toll Roads, aghast, trying to figure out what had happened – and said she’d willingly pay for the missed tolls. The penalties, however, were absurd.

Toll Road officials wouldn’t budge. “It was, ‘Too bad, so sad, you owe this and there’s nothing you can do about it,’” Hutton said.

And so the Toll Roads continued to garnish her wages – $11,030, in total, with $265 going to the sheriff for delivering the garnishment notice – until her husband’s military duty took the family to other posts and she left her job in 2008.

The Toll Roads tried to put her on a monthly payment plan, but she didn’t have a job at the backwater where they were stationed, and no payments were made.

In 2009, Hutton joined a class-action lawsuit against the Toll Roads and the Orange County Transportation Authority, asserting that the penalties were “constitutionally excessive” and collection procedures violated due process.

The Toll Roads settled that case, agreeing to waive $41 million in penalties – a 29 percent reduction. That translated to a $5,000 credit for Hutton, which, as she calculates it, meant the Toll Roads recouped nearly $16,000 on the nearly $30,000 bill.

She thought that was the end of it.

The family spent years in Northern California and Twentynine Palms before Michael Hutton returned to duty at Camp Pendleton last year. The family moved to Oceanside. Sherri Hutton got a job on base, working for the Department of Defense fire department as an administrator and human resources liaison.

The Toll Roads caught up with them soon after.

Both were named in a renewal of the judgment filed in Superior Court last year. The Toll Roads grabbed money from Hutton’s bank account – something the aforementioned judgment allows it to do – and they are now appearing in court, trying to end the drama.

The Toll Roads has a patriotic policy exempting active-duty military and their spouses from penalties on unpaid tolls. If officials would apply that policy here, it would transform Hutton’s $31,450 debt into a credit of more than $8,000 in her favor, she said in her legal response.

TOLL ROADS SAYS

Yes, the Toll Roads does consider a person’s status as active-duty military, the Toll Roads argued in court papers.

It adopted a program last year that features education for military families and penalty waivers for first-time violations. But this program was not in place when Hutton’s violations accumulated a decade ago, and thus doesn’t apply.

“The courtesy does not extend to situations of abuse and repeated violations, and certainly this courtesy does not apply to a situation where circumstances have led to and resulted in a civil judgment,” CEO Kraman said. “Our military partners are supportive of the program and share our position of preventing abuse.”

The agency works with account holders to ensure it has accurate and up-to-date account information, Kraman said. It understands that people are busy and may forget to update credit card, contact or vehicle information – and thus it has “a robust notification system” that includes robo-calls, texts, emails and mailed letters to alert customers if there’s a problem.

The vast majority update their account information in a timely manner even without these notifications, Kraman said. But in instances where a customer does not respond or take action to make a payment, it will suspend the account, “resulting in a negative balance.”

Once an account is suspended, the Toll Roads notifies the customer again, he said. If the customer keeps using the roads without payment, those trips become toll evasion violations.

The vast majority of users understand the rules, he said. And penalties are waived for first-time violators if the toll is paid within 30 days.

It’s rare that overdue accounts transform into civil judgments – fewer than 20 per year, Kraman said.

FAIR?

The fairness of the Toll Roads’ fines and penalties – or lack thereof – is certainly not a new issue.

The agency has been targeted by a series of lawsuits in recent years, most citing unfair or excessive fines. One seeking class-action status was filed in the spring, after the Toll Roads eliminated cash collection booths. Some drivers without transponders have been flummoxed over how to pay tolls, racking up violations totaling thousands of dollars.

Kraman defended the system as just. “(N)o court has ever ruled that the TCA penalties or toll violation enforcement procedures are unconstitutional or otherwise unlawful,” he said. “In fact, our violation penalties are lower than allowable under state law.”

Hutton’s $49,000 judgment is not the agency’s largest; that one was $112,000, Kraman said.

Will Hutton’s bill get that high before all this is worked out? Interest accumulates on the judgment even as the two sides argue over what’s fair.

“I had always had an account in good standing up until that point, and we now have an account in good standing,” Hutton said. She’s due back in court next month, and hopes to work something out with the Toll Roads in the interim.

In the meantime, she has some words of wisdom for everyone who auto-pays with a debit or credit card: “Don’t. Do direct to your bank account instead.”

Contact the writer: tsforza@scng.com