In Crashes, Heads Usually Lose : And Yet, the Debate Continues on Law Requiring Helmets

Devin Swanson, 16 of Buena Park, wouldn’t consider not wearing a helmet when he goes off-road motorcycle riding.

“Oh, yeah,” the high school sophomore says, “I always wear a helmet when I ride a dirt bike because I go crazy in the desert.”

He doesn’t, however, wear a helmet on the street where, he admits: “I do go fast a lot because it’s fun. You just don’t think of falling on a street.”

That explains why Devin wasn’t wearing a helmet the night of June 2 when he borrowed his brother’s motorcycle for a short ride to see a friend.

He never made it to his friend’s house.

Devin says he can’t remember the accident, but police believe he was going about 60 m.p.h. on a residential street and, judging by the skid marks, his brake locked when he tried to slow. He hit the curb headfirst, crushing his nose and breaking most of the bones in his face.

Would Wear a Helmet

Devin now says he definitely would wear a helmet if he ever rides a motorcycle again.

But he’s not sure how he feels about a proposed state law that would require all motorcycle riders to wear helmets--that’s despite four missing teeth, a wired jaw, a blood clot in his brain and the prospect of two more operations, one to remove the blood clot and another to repair his facial bones.

“I don’t know. . . . They should probably just leave it up to the person,” he says from his bed at Western Medical Center in Santa Ana.

“I know if I was wearing a helmet I wouldn’t have broken my face, but if I was wearing a helmet I might have broken my neck. The weight of the helmet could have thrown my head around.”

Devin’s mother, Pat, not only supports the proposed state law but would like to see a helmet come with every motorcycle sold.

“I can’t see any reason to ride on the street or anywhere without a helmet,” she says. “I know if I hit a motorcyclist with the car I would rather he survived.”

The battle over mandatory helmet legislation has raged off and on in California for two decades.

Helmet advocates received their biggest victory to date on June 1, when the Assembly approved the bill, the first time such a proposal ever cleared either house of the Legislature.

The bill, written by Assemblyman Richard Floyd (D-Hawthorne), has been referred to the Senate Transportation Committee. The committee’s June 30 public hearing is expected to spur as much passion as an Assembly hearing in April, when hundreds of Hells Angels and other biker groups descended upon the Capitol in protest.

Floyd, who argued during the Assembly debate that motorcycle riders should want “something between their skull and the pavement,” contends that the state pays 72% of the estimated $65 million a year in hospitalization costs alone for motorcycle crash victims, with county and other public sources paying another 10%.

Twenty states have passed helmet laws. But in California, where the California Highway Patrol reports that 851 people died and 28,097 were injured in 1986 in motorcycle accidents, the debate continues.

On the pro-helmet side are parents like Janice Baerg of Lake Forest, whose 18-year-old son, Michael Huppman, died in 1985 of head injuries after his motorcycle ran off a freeway during a trip to Oregon.

Michael, who was not wearing a helmet, died five days later without regaining consciousness. His unhelmeted passenger, 17-year-old Saxon Ellert of Garden Grove, was severely brain damaged and has had to be retaught everything--from feeding himself to using a toilet.

Baerg, who later spoke in support of the bill at the Assembly public hearing, found her grief turn to anger after Michael died.

“I kept seeing all these kids riding with no helmets, and I thought, they’re so young,” she says. “I wanted to pull over and say, ‘Dummy, don’t you realize what you might do to yourself and put your families through?’

“But they don’t realize. When you’re 18 you don’t think anything is going to happen to you.”

On the anti-helmet side are motorcyclists like Marc Ullerich of Orange, who insist that a mandatory helmet law would take away their freedom of choice.

Personal Preference

“It all comes to down to personal preference; this is America, and we’re supposed to be free,” said Ullerich, 28, who has been riding motorcycles for eight years and does not wear a helmet.

“Let those who ride decide,” said John Siemsen, 31, a salesman at Harley-Davidson of Santa Ana. “When it comes down to Sacramento requiring me to wear gear to protect myself from myself, then that’s an infringement on my personal freedom.”

Cathy Hawkesby of Azusa disagrees. “I think people who say you’re taking away their rights are, in my opinion, stupid because they don’t realize the gamble they’re taking, or they do and they don’t care.”

Hawkesby’s son, David, 23, was recently discharged from Western Neuro Care Center in Tustin after suffering head injuries in a motorcycle accident. He was not wearing a helmet.

“I mean,” she says, “why did they put traffic lights on the road to make you stop at an intersection? Why do they make them wear helmets for football? Why do catchers in baseball have to wear masks? It’s for protection.”

False Sense of Safety

Motorcyclist Joedy Ellers, 43, of Santa Ana says helmets give riders a false sense of safety--particularly younger, inexperienced riders who are more likely to be involved in accidents:

“You put a brain bucket on them and they think nothing’s going to happen to them. To me, helmets are like liquor: It’s false courage, false hope. They create a false illusion of safety for the hazards they really represent . . . You can’t see out of them and you can’t hear out of them.”

“All helmets hinder your sound and sight perception,” Siemsen agrees. “If you hear a siren and you’re not wearing a helmet, you can turn your head and sense where it’s coming from. If you hear a siren and you’re wearing a helmet, it’s like being in a car with the windows rolled up and the stereo turned on.”

At Harley-Davidson of Santa Ana, sales manager Michael Merryman says in the last three months the shop has gathered more than 1,000 signatures from people opposed to the bill. Customers also have signed hundreds of form letters that have been sent to legislators demanding that they vote against the bill.

“I don’t know anyone who wants a mandatory helmet law,” says Merryman, who says the shop is not opposed to anyone wearing a helmet but “we’re opposed to mandatory helmets.”

Certain Situations

He says helmets should be worn “at the rider’s discretion and, naturally, for all the reasons everyone is citing.”

And yet, Merryman says, “Nobody can say when this guy is flat on the freeway that a helmet is going to make a difference. There are certain situations where it really doesn’t matter.”

Dr. Richard Selby, a Tustin neurosurgeon who supports the helmet bill and has testified in court about head trauma and motorcycle accidents, says wearing a helmet at lower speeds--less than 30 m.p.h.--would indeed protect the rider.

“The point is at the higher speeds the helmet is not going to help,” he says, “but most of these accidents occur at lower speeds--when the person has slowed the bike down, has made some effort to get off the bike or roll it.”

In those accidents, Selby says, “The helmet would be very important, because these people sustain very little damage to the rest of their body and then the head gets hit on the pavement.”

Most Common Reason

One of the most common reasons cited by motorcyclists for not wanting to wear a helmet is the fear that it may contribute to a neck injury in an accident.

Merryman, who does not usually wear a helmet, maintains that his neck was broken in an accident because of the helmet he was wearing while traveling through a state that has a mandatory helmet law.

“I may not have hit the way I did if I didn’t have this weight strapped to my head,” he says. “Drop a fiberglass helmet--it bounces. I bounced. I rolled head over heels with this helmet on. There’s a chance I might have died without it, but this is a big if. It may or may not have contributed to my injury.”

Dr. John West, a general and vascular surgeon at St. Joseph Hospital in Orange and the founder of the nonprofit Orange County Trauma Society, says a helmet, “which absorbs energy, protects against both head injuries and spine injuries.”

In a study funded by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, researcher Harry Hurt at USC investigated nearly every aspect of 900 motorcycle accidents in the Los Angeles area and analyzed another 3,600 other motorcycle traffic accidents reports in the same area.

Among his study’s findings are:

- Helmeted riders had fewer neck injuries than unhelmeted riders.

- Safety helmets did not reduce critical traffic sounds, limit vision, or cause fatigue or loss of attention. No accident was related to helmet use.

- The median precrash speed was 29.8 m.p.h., and the median crash speed was 21.5 m.p.h., and the one-in-a-thousand crash speed is approximately 86 m.p.h.

- Less than 10% of the motorcycle riders involved in these accidents had insurance of any kind.

The study concluded that “the use of the safety helmet is the single critical factor in the prevention or reduction of head injury.”

Peter Fassnacht, vice-president of the Motorcycle Safety Foundation, a Costa Mesa-based national nonprofit organization, says the foundation’s position “is pretty clear: Whether or not there is a law, we feel everyone should wear a helmet when they ride a motorcycle.”

A helmet, he says, “is a very important piece of equipment. Many of the arguments presented opposing laws about the effectiveness of a helmet or that they impair hearing or visibility or somehow contributed to causing accidents are just not borne out by legitimate research on the subject.”

Selby says he favors the helmet law because he sees the trauma caused by accidents in which the drivers didn’t wear helmets. Of the 175 head trauma cases at Western Medical Center in 1986, 80 were motorcycle accidents. More than 50% of the patients were not wearing helmets.

Son Given 50-50 Chance

Cathy Hawkesby says her son was given less than a 50-50 chance of survival after brain surgery. David is making progress but must go to a day-care rehabilitation center for the next six to 12 months.

“He’s fully functional body-wise, but he still has brain damage in his memory and in his speech,” says Hawkesby, who has gotten rid of David’s motorcycle.

“He will never sit his rear end on the back of a motorcycle as long as I have a breath in my body--that is a guarantee.”