LAGUNA BEACH — State medical officials acknowledged Tuesday that they failed to act quickly to investigate a Laguna Beach doctor with a history of drug-related arrests who was charged in a deadly head-on collision Sunday.
Internist Ronald Joseph Allen, 31, who was held on suspicion of driving under the influence of drugs, on Tuesday was charged with two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. A Mission Viejo couple was killed and their 11-year-old daughter remains in critical condition.
It was the third time in two years that Allen had been arrested on drug- and alcohol-related charges. The second arrest prompted a Laguna Beach hospital to terminate Allen's staff privileges and report it to the California Medical Board.
But the board apparently failed to act on the report filed by South Coast Medical Center, and an official acknowledged Tuesday that quick action might have helped.
The hospital's report "sat on a clerk's desk for a month" and wasn't entered into the board's enforcement computer system, where it would have triggered an investigation that might have pressured Allen into a special substance abuse program for physicians, said Dixon Arnett, the board's executive director.
"If there had been a way to have taken action and ring the wake-up call and (Allen) had responded, there is treatment," Arnett said.
The state's inaction wasn't the only lapse in the way that state and local officials handled matters involving Allen's arrests.
When Laguna Beach police arrested him in June in connection with a hit and run, a computer check by officers failed to inform them that Allen already had an outstanding court warrant for resisting arrest and drunk driving stemming from an April, 1992, collision in Laguna Niguel.
Although there's no immediate explanation as to why the computer check didn't alert officers, it wouldn't necessarily have kept Allen from driving. But it would have prompted officers to detain him and require him to post bail on the warrant.
Deputy Dist. Atty. Robert Molko said that if Allen is convicted, each count of gross vehicular manslaughter carries a maximum of 4, 6, or 10 years in prison.
The California Highway Patrol, which investigated the accident, has said it will ask that murder charges be filed against Allen, and Molko said Tuesday that "pending further investigation, we haven't made a decision on that yet."
