Vehicular manslaughter charge filed against driver accused of fatally hitting Lafayette school crossing guard
The driver of a vehicle that hit and killed a school crossing guard in Lafayette earlier this year has been charged with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter, authorities said Friday.
Phyllis Meehan, 78, has yet to be arraigned and a date has not been set, Contra Costa District Attorney District Attorney’s Office spokeswoman Bobbi Mauler said in a statement.
The charges stem from a collision where Meehan’s vehicle struck crossing guard Ashley Dias, 45, around 3 p.m. on Sept. 8, in front of Stanley Middle School on two-lane School Street near Paradise Court. Authorities allege that Meehan — “without malice,” according to a deputy district attorney’s statement — drove a GMC Yukon SUV into another vehicle and proceeded to accelerate into the crosswalk in front of the school.
A statement from the district attorney’s office Friday afternoon said that “vehicular manslaughter is a case of negligence – a failure to exercise a reasonable standard of care and caution.”
Dias pushed a student out of the way of the SUV before it hit him, authorities said. Lafayette police officers found Dias trapped under a car when they arrived at the scene and pulled him out with help from some bystanders, officials said.
An ambulance rushed him to a hospital, but he died from his injuries later that day.
Dias was on his second day of the job when the tragedy happened. He lived just blocks away from the school.
Dias was remembered for his fun-loving personality, sincerity and selflessness. A devoted Bay Area sports fan, he was remembered by sports-talk radio personality Ryan Covay of 95.7-FM, who said that he and Dias had been friends for 30 years, after attending Acalanes High School in Lafayette together in the 1990s.
“When he would laugh, his eyes would get real big and he would light up — it was a big old belly laugh,” Covay said. “He always looked at things on the positive side. … I never met anybody that didn’t like Ashley Dias.”
The Golden State Warriors hosted Dias’ family at a home game after his death. Former Warriors player Zaza Pachulia said his sons attended the same school, and one had witnessed the crash: “We’ve had some really tough days. The tragedy touched all of us. It’s devastating to see.”
His death brought more attention to issues of safety around schools in the area. In 2015, the city of Lafayette increased funding for the crossing guard program after two students were hit and injured at the school in separate incidents.
Over the past 10 years, there had been 23.08 pedestrian and bicycle fatalities per 100,000 people in Lafayette compared with 18.22 in Berkeley and 12.89 in Walnut Creek, according to a state database that collects and processes information gathered from collision scenes. The data was sampled by Bay Area News Group shortly after Dias’ death.
Lafayette was also the least safe of comparable nearby suburban communities in terms of bike and pedestrian fatalities or serious injuries as a result of collisions from 2014 to 2019, the system’s data shows. Those numbers are 22.62 per 100,000 population over the five-year period in Lafayette, 20.20 in nearby Orinda, 12.31 in Moraga, and 9.36 in Danville.
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