Cyclist's death spurs calls for driving law changes

The Oct. 25, 2014, photo on Jonathan Leyva's Facebook page shows a bottle of pour-and-serve Jose Cuervo Margaritas and a case of Bud Light.

"Oh yeah, it's Friday drink drink," the caption with the photo reads.

Another photo posted on Dec. 6, 2014, shows someone holding a bottle of Corona in front of the steering wheel of a Chevrolet vehicle.

“Yep, I’m breaking the law,” a post attributed to Leyva reads.

The posts were made while Leyva was serving a year of probation because of a marijuana arrest. As a probation condition, Leyva was forbidden from drinking or using drugs.

Yet those photos and court documents indicate that time and again Leyva squandered his opportunities to wean himself from his apparent addiction to drugs and alcohol, with tragic repercussions. On Aug. 16 around 10 a.m., police say Leyva struck and fatally injured bicyclist Gregary Wade Franck while driving drunk on Grand Avenue in Des Moines. He also was driving while his license was revoked.

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As news spread of the popular Iowa cyclist's death, Scott Sumpter made a promise to find out how Leyva was behind the wheel.

“We will take action soon to find out why the legal system failed,” Sumpter wrote in an Aug. 18 post on his BikeIowa Facebook page that got 355 “likes.” Below the message was a picture of a smiling Franck, who worked as a sales manager in an Ankeny bike shop.

In Iowa and across the nation, bicyclists have called for stronger laws after deaths caused by drunken drivers, said Becky Iannotta, a communications manager with Mothers Against Drunk Driving, or MADD. The group has backed bills introduced during Iowa’s last three legislative sessions, but all failed to become law.

Sumpter, a leader in the Iowa bike community because of his BikeIowa.com website, reached out to the group last week to talk about steps the cycling community could take to stop future deaths.

“This guy is just one guy,” he said of the driver accused of killing Franck. “There’s all sorts of people with barred licenses and drunk drivers, and it could easily happen again tomorrow.”

Probation did little to stop driver

Jonathan Leyva Rodriguez faces a string of charges in Franck's death, including homicide by operating while intoxicated.

Police claim the 31-year-old, who identified himself as Jonathan Leyva in a handwritten court document and on his Facebook page, had a blood alcohol content of 0.213, nearly three times the legal limit.

In 2011, Leyva was convicted of operating while intoxicated, according to his certified driving record. He was barred from holding a driver’s license until at least 2017 after he was caught driving twice after his OWI and was convicted of driving while revoked or suspended.

Police had charged Leyva with eight drug and driving violations in the 16 months before the fatal crash.

Leyva, who wrote in court records that he worked at an Abelardo’s Mexican Restaurant, did not respond to a Des Moines Register reporter’s interview request left for him at the Polk County Jail. However, in an interview with Local 5 News, he admitted drinking liquor and beer starting around 5 a.m. the morning of the crash.

Leyva also told the TV station he’d recently been sober for some time.

“This just happened to be my relapse,” he said in the interview. “This is probably the worst thing I’ve ever done in my life. … I’m not a bad person, I just made the wrong choices to drink and drive.”

All of those run-ins with police, judges, prosecutors and probation officers seem like red flags now, Sumpter said. His mission is to find out whether there was any intervention that could have stopped Leyva from getting behind the wheel the morning of the fatal crash, he said.

“A bunch of little things can add up, and all of a sudden you’ve got a tragedy on your hands,” he said.

Attempts at intervention

Indeed, court records show attempts by authorities to keep Leyva from hurting himself or others.

In late December, Leyva underwent a substance-abuse evaluation as part of his probation sentence for the March 2014 marijuana arrest. It was recommended that he enter an extended outpatient treatment program.

But Leyva never showed proof of completing or even attending such a program, probation officer Enrique Orrante wrote in a May 4 probation violation report. Orrante filed the report after Leyva had been arrested for cocaine and marijuana possession.

At a June hearing to deal with both the probation violation and the new arrest, District Associate Judge James Birkenholz suspended a three-year jail and prison sentence, instead putting Leyva on probation for another year.

Birkenholz ordered him into an outpatient drug treatment program through United Community Services, and, in the Local News 5 interview, Leyva said he had been undergoing treatment through the Des Moines-based nonprofit, but relapsed.

Interlock device ordered

It was while Leyva was on probation that another step was taken to try to get him to drive responsibly. The Iowa Department of Transportation required Leyva to install an interlock ignition device on vehicles he drove as a condition of getting a work permit.

The mechanisms, installed by one of four companies approved to do business in Iowa, prevent a car from starting if its driver blows over a 0.025 blood alcohol level.

Leyva got the permit in January 2015, after the department received confirmation that an interlock device had been installed in his car, a Saturn S-Series, said Dennis Kleen, a DOT manager who reviews driver data.

But that was not the car he was driving when police say he fatally struck Franck. Instead, he was in a Chevrolet Equinox registered to a woman living with him in a West Des Moines home.

Advocate: Law changes needed

A prosecutor, defense lawyer and others interviewed by the Register said there’s almost no intervention that guarantees an offender such as Leyva follows all the rules.

Leyva could have been put behind bars for his most recent probation violation, but the crimes were all misdemeanor drug possessions, said West Des Moines criminal defense lawyer Robert Rehkemper.

Routinely locking up drug offenders on probation violations based on concerns about what might happen would balloon the state’s prison population at a high cost to taxpayers, he said.

However, Harris, the MADD government affairs director, believes there are changes that could make Iowa roads safer overall.

Iowa earns two out of five stars on MADD’s scale rating drunken driving laws in each state, he said. And the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported earlier in August that Iowa had 715 alcohol-impaired driving episodes per 1,000 residents — well above the national rate of 505 episodes.

Harris points to several provisions as possibilities for Iowa.

In Minnesota, a person required to have a ignition interlock device must blow into it 30 times per month, a measure aimed at counteracting people from using other cars without the devices, Harris said.

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Additionally, under Iowa’s current law, a first-time OWI offender whose blood-alcohol content was below 0.10 and who doesn’t cause an accident while driving drunk needs no ignition interlock device to receive a temporary restricted license. House File 186, a bill backed by MADD and introduced during the 2015 session, would have required all first-time OWI offenders to install the devices.

MADD also encourages states to adopt so-called “compliance-based removal,” a law that stops drivers from removing ignition interlock devices until a certain amount of time has elapsed without triggering the device with an alcohol-positive test, Harris said. A bill introduced to the Legislature in 2014, Senate File 2299, would have required a driver to have clean tests for a three-month period before removal.

Twenty-five states, including Nebraska, Minnesota, Missouri and Illinois, have compliance-based removal laws. Harris said the laws “teach” a driver to stay sober behind the wheel, instead of simply waiting out the period ordered by a court or department of transportation.

Rehkemper and others oppose the practice, noting that interlock devices can show alcohol-positive results if someone eats yeast-based products such as bread or uses mouthwash. The devices also have to be rented from private companies, which creates a financial penalty that imposes greater hardship on poor defendants, he said.

But the issue will likely come up again in 2016 amid calls for change spurred by Franck's death, Harris said.

On Friday, the nonprofit Des Moines Bicycle Collective wrote, "It's time for people who bike to demand better, safer conditions on Iowa roads."

“There is not a silver bullet, but that doesn’t mean the lawmakers and the people of Iowa should just throw up their hands and say, ‘Well, there’s nothing that can be done,’” Harris said.