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Car hits motorcycle and lives are shattered 1 dead, 1 crippled, 1 facing criminal charges Sunday, August 27, 2000 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Richard Rosenberger wasn't supposed to be driving a car. He had no auto insurance, his father says. His car bore license plates from another vehicle. And after three drunken driving violations in 7 1/2 years -- once for riding a bicycle while intoxicated -- his driver's license was suspended.
But on June 25, the 32-year-old Westmoreland County man was driving drunk again, state police say.
An hour and a half before sundown, on a curve on a well-traveled two-lane highway in northwest Bedford County, Rosenberger's car swerved out of a line of traffic. He smashed into a motorcycle, the lead bike in a line of four carrying people home to the Blairsville area after a daylong outing.
The impact hurled driver Dale Empfield, 38, through the air and into a ditch, his left arm torn away.
His fiancee, Tina Decker, crashed face-up beside the ditch, bones mashed in her hand, her left leg shredded to amputation just above the knee.
Now, two months after the accident, five weeks after Empfield died of his injuries, state police have ratcheted up Rosenberger's latest drunken driving case to homicide by vehicle and homicide by vehicle while intoxicated.
Rosenberger, in Bedford County Jail, faces a preliminary hearing next week on charges that District Attorney Dwight Diehl said would carry a minimum three-year sentence and, according to prosecutors, could get him up to 13 years in prison.
The law told Rosenberger to stop driving. He didn't. And the toll was one dead, one permanently crippled.
"Unfortunately, this happens all too frequently, where people under suspension resume driving," said Arlene Baxter, executive director of Mothers Against Drunk Driving for Allegheny, Westmoreland and Beaver counties. "It's a big problem, and it's not something we can monitor."
"He has a problem with alcohol," said Rosenberger's father, Roy Rosenberger, 71, a retired truck driver and widower who lives next-door to his son in Seward. "He never drank on the job, but he poured it down otherwise. He's probably an alcoholic. After his other arrests, he was supposed to go to classes to deal with the alcohol. He never did."
Richard Rosenberger's attorney, Bedford County Public Defender Douglas Goldhaber, could not be reached for comment.
Richard Rosenberger was one of five children born during his father's second marriage. He had a son with one girlfriend, had a failed marriage and was seeing another woman, Roy Rosenberger said.
"When he wasn't drinking, you couldn't have a nicer guy," the elder Rosenberger said. "But when he was drinking, you'd think he was out to whip the world -- mouthy and temperamental."
In December 1989, in a piece of Cambria County a few miles from home, Richard Rosenberger hit an icy patch and overturned a car. State law says a driver is legally drunk with a blood alcohol level of 0.10; Rosenberger's was 0.13.
He lost his driver's license for two months, was accepted into the county's Accelerated Rehabilitative Disposition program and, after keeping a clean record for a year, was discharged in 1991.
But Rosenberger was barely out of the Cambria County program when he was charged with public drunkenness and criminal mischief in Lancaster County, where he had gone to live with a brother. The offenses got him probation.
Back home in Seward, in November 1995, a state trooper charged Rosenberger with drunken driving, public drunkenness and disorderly conduct after he found him sitting, passed out in his car as it sat, engine running, on a local highway. Rosenberger was glassy-eyed, couldn't walk without help and turned profane when the trooper confronted him, the arrest affidavit said.
Rosenberger refused a blood alcohol test, pleaded guilty to drunken driving and lost his license again.
Twenty-two months later, in September 1997, state police slapped Rosenberger with his third drunken driving charge -- this time as he rode a bicycle down a Seward street. Police showed up after a caller said Rosenberger hit and choked his girlfriend's son, according to arrest papers.
State trooper R.D. Capehart wrote in an arrest affidavit that he found Rosenberger cycling down the street, declaring, "I don't have [a driver's license.] I'm suspended for DUI. That's why I'm driving a bike."
State law allows cyclists to be charged with drunken driving. Rosenberger's blood alcohol level this time was 0.163.
"Due to the fact that it was a domestic situation and there was no evidence he was operating the bicycle in an improper manner, I thought it was a bit of overreach on the part of state police," said Arthur McQuillan, a Johnstown lawyer who represented Rosenberger.
But Rosenberger pleaded guilty, was sentenced in Westmoreland County Court in November 1998 and spent a month on house arrest, then 11 months under a program tantamount to probation. He has yet to pay a $300 fine or finish court-ordered, alcohol-related outpatient treatment, according to county Adult Probation and Parole Department records.
His license was suspended again, although Pennsylvania Department of Transportation spokesman Rich Kirkpatrick said state law barred him from saying for how long.
"It's another year, at least," Roy Rosenberger said.
For most of Richard Rosenberger's last four years without an operator's license, his father drove him to work daily, a 12-mile trip to a Johnstown plumbing and heating company. Last spring, though, things began changing when Richard Rosenberger bought a car from his father -- the one he would drive into the fatal crash.
"He didn't have a valid license but ... that's when he started driving on his own, when he got the car," the elder Rosenberger said.
On June 25, Richard Rosenberger left home to start his fourth week on a new job, working for a company trimming brush and trees from along power lines near Interstate 95 in eastern Virginia.
"He left here that night sober as a judge," Roy Rosenberger said. "When he got to Bedford County, he was drunk as a coot. I don't know what happened."
Among biker pals, Dale Empfield was usually the leader, the motorcycle at the front of the pack, said his younger brother, Ron Empfield, as he sat last week outside his mobile home, next to his brother's place.
To get him to lead, though, you had to coax him away from home first.
This hilltop on Route 22, eight miles east of Blairsville, is called Mount Tabor Road, a little-traveled lane lined with mobile homes. And by most accounts, Dale Empfield was a homebody here, consumed by working on the ailing Harley Davidsons to which he took a deep shine.
"He didn't do anything other than work on motorcycles from morning to night," Ron Empfield said.
On June 25, though, Empfield and six companions -- four bikes in all -- headed to a Johnstown-area congregation of motorcyclists, a ride-in called Thunder in the Valley. From there, they rode south to The Ship Hotel, a long-idle bit of roadside kitsch, a restaurant and hotel built to look like a ship, perched beside Route 30, on the mountaintop where Somerset and Bedford counties meet.
By then, it was getting toward evening. "We wanted to get home by 8," Decker said.
Dale Empfield, always the decision-maker, decided that the little caravan would roll into Bedford County, northwest into suburban Johnstown, then on to Mount Tabor Road. But they would get no farther than a curve on Route 56, nine miles northwest of Bedford.
"Dale always rode first. I was his wing man," said Steve Crusan, who was making the ride with his wife, Lillian, on his motorcycle. "I was two bike lengths back, and all of a sudden, this car pulls out from an oncoming line of maybe 10, 12 cars. Dale didn't have a split second to react."
Crusan felt a shower of debris hitting him. Empfield's bike shot into the air. Empfield and Decker flew sideways.
"I remember myself and the motorcycle, flying through the air," Decker said. "I remember lying in the ditch, on my back, with a horrible pain in my leg."
She recalled telling the bystanders, " 'Lift up my leg! Lift up my leg!' But there was no leg."
Friends found Empfield bleeding badly, one arm gone, his pelvis, leg and facial bones broken. Crusan used a passer-by's belt as a tourniquet on the remains of Decker's torn-away leg.
"I yelled to Dale, 'Hey, Buck' -- we called him Buck -- how are you doing down there?' " Crusan said. "He says, 'I've been better.' "
Into it all walked Rosenberger, smelling of beer, Crusan said.
"He says, 'I'll take over.' I said, 'Who are you?' He says, 'I'm an EMT,' " Crusan recounted. "Then his next statement is, 'I was driving the car.' I said, 'Get out of here.' "
Sometime later, Rosenberger shuffled up to state Trooper John Beaken, who had just arrived.
"He said something to the effect of, 'Go ahead and do what you have to do. I hurt somebody,' " Beaken said. "He held out his wrists to be handcuffed."
Empfield was rushed to Western Maryland Health Systems' Memorial Campus in Cumberland, Md., then transferred to Conemaugh Memorial Medical Center in Johnstown.
Twenty-seven days later, he died.
Decker was flown to Conemaugh. Sixteen days later, she was discharged. A day after that, from a wheelchair, her 12-year-old son beside her for comfort, she testified at Rosenberger's preliminary hearing.
Rosenberger is in Bedford County Jail, awaiting what promises to be a series of pretrial hearings.
"I have heart problems, and I'm not feeling too good about it. He's not feeling too good either," Roy Rosenberger said. "He's straightened out considerably since he's been in there. He's seeing a minister. But he's really worried."
Decker, a former McDonald's manager, is living in a borrowed mobile home, cleared of most of its furniture so that she can maneuver her wheelchair. She expects to move back to Mount Tabor Road, to quarters that promise to be tight going for a wheelchair, in a mobile home next to her brother's place.
"You can't even get a wheelchair through the door," her brother, Chuck Jones, said. "She says she's going to do it, though."
Decker talks about medical appointments and fittings for an artificial leg and rehabilitation that will go into next year. Amid all that, Decker said she and son Jimmy mull it over daily -- the accident, the injuries, Empfield's death.
"We talk about it every night," she said, "and we cry every night."
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