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Fifteen months ago, Guy A. Lange, 91, drove
his pickup the wrong way on Interstate 70, causing an accident
that killed a promising college student from Chesterfield.
The accident not only snuffed out Jason Suroff's
life. It forever altered the lives of Lange and his 85-year-old
wife, Minola.
Lange spent a few days in jail and in February,
a judge declared him incompetent. He was handcuffed and taken
to Fulton State Hospital.
Lange died there Monday without ever understanding
what he had done wrong. He was buried Friday in Rolla, with
his four grandsons as pallbearers.
Earlier
this year, Suroff's parents formed an organization called Concerned
Americans for Responsible Driving, or CARD, to try to get incompetent
drivers off the road. Now, some of Lange's are ready to join
that campaign. Lange's family agrees that the accident could
have been prevented if Missouri required periodic drivers tests,
as Illinois and a few other states do.
"I will do anything I can to get a law that
will protect these elderly people - and protect others from
them," said Sister Rose Stephen Cento, a school principal in
St. Louis who was Lange's niece. "I can barely stand to think
of that young man with his whole life ahead of him, dead because
of my uncle.
"Lange's only child, Betty Slunacker of Overland,
also supports the Suroffs' efforts. "We had tried everything
we could think of to get Daddy off the road," she said. "Nothing
worked. People need some help from the state when they're dealing
with relatives like my dad."
Refused Nursing Home
How Guy Lange came to be heading the Wrong
way on Interstate 70 on July 27,1993, is a story is familiar
to anyone with a stubborn parent suffering from dementia. It
happened despite the family's best efforts to curb Lange's driving,
as he became more and more forgetful.
Lange's family agreed to tell their story
to help people understand how difficult it is to get incompetent
driver off the road.
Lange was a World War I veteran and, former
minor league baseball player who was a sought-after carpenter
and homebuilder in Rolla, where he and his wife and daughter
settled till 1941.
Over the years, Lange built three houses
for his own family, including the white frame house with "his
and her" garages that the couple shared until last year. Well
into his 80s" Lange supplemented his Social Security check with
income from the safe of custom-made dog and cat house's and
scavenged golf and tennis balls.
Baseball remained a passion throughout his
life. Lange coached and managed numerous teams In the Rolla
area and often traveled with the Miners of the University of
Missouri at Rolla in the '70s and '80s. In 1987, the Rolla High
School softball players, made him their honorary coach.
"I enjoy working with young kids," Lange
told the Rolla Daily News in August of that year. "I like being
around them. They always listen to I what I have to say."
In the late' 80s, Minola Lange began showing
signs of Alzheimer's disease. She stopped cooking and keeping
house. Guy Lange didn't pick up the slack.
Because the Langes' daughter doesn't drive,
Cento and her late mother, Rosaleen Cento, began traveling to
Rolla each month to visit and clean.
"Their home was a-total disaster, Cento recalled.
"The plumbing didn't work, and they didn't have a stove. There
were Styrofoam food containers everywhere, and newspapers and
junk piled nearly as high as the ceiling. When you walked by
the sink, a cloud of bugs would fly up."
Cento and Slunacker tried to talk the couple
into going into a nursing home, but they refused. Cento anonymously
reported the house to the health and fire departments, hoping
it would be condemned. (It wasn't.)
She got the Missouri Division of Aging to
send in social worker and homemakers, but often, the couple
refused to let them in. She tried to talk Guy Lange into giving
her the keys to his truck, but he refused.
Family Couldn't Stop Him
The family did extract a promise from Lange
to limit his driving to the neighborhood. So they were shocked
when they got a call in the early morning hours of July 28,
1993, from a police officer in an Illinois town near the Indiana
border.
Around midnight, the officer had found the
Langes in their truck; parked along a country road. Minola Lange
had $900 and several uncashed Social Security checks in her
purse; Guy Lange had more than $1,000 in coffee cans.
The couple apparently had set out the day
before to visit relatives near Topeka, Kan. Just west of the
interstate exit at Marshall, Mo., a witness saw Guy Lange's
tan truck make a U-turn and head east in the westbound passing
lane. Jason Suroff was driving his father's Lincoln Continental
in the same lane, on his way, with friends; to a Van Halen concert
in Kansas City. He swerved to avoid Lange's truck, and the car
rolled over three times.
Suroff died instantly when the roof of the
car caved in and broke his neck. His passengers survived.
Lange kept driving, crossing the grassy median
and continuing east in the proper lane. Witnesses recorded his
license plate.
Knowing nothing of the crash, Lange's daughter
and son-in-law retrieved the couple from a police station in
Marshall, III, 290 miles from Marshall, Mo. The Langes had no
idea where they were or where they had been headed. Nor did
they mention any accident on 1-70.
"We told him again that he shouldn't be driving,"
said Lange's son-in-law, Galen Slunacker. "But we didn't know
how to make sure he didn't."
Two days after they got back from Illinois,
a Missouri State trooper interviewed the Langes. "They seem
to have memory loss and may be incapable of recalling the incident,"
he wrote in his report.
Nearly three months passed before the Department
of Revenue revoked Guy Lange's driver's license for refusing
to take a physical exam.
In December, Guy Lange was taken to jail
for failing to show up in court in Saline County, where the
accident occurred. His daughter had Minola Lange decelerated
incompetent, and she was taken to a nursing home in Rolla. When
Guy Lange posted bond, he moved into the nursing home, too.
To make him go, his daughter told him that a judge had ordered
him there.
In February, Guy Lange was taken to court
in Saline County to face charges of reckless and imprudent driving.
A judge found him incompetent, and committed him, to Fulton
State Hospital. Ire never saw his wife of 59 years again. She
is delusional and believes that he left her for another woman.
Families Need Help
While Lange was still alive, his niece,
Cento, felt constrained about becoming active in the effort
to change the law-governing drivers. Now she's ready to join
forces with the Suroffs, if they'll let her.
"Families need the state's help with this
problem," she said. "It's better for an elderly person to be
angry with an outsider - the state - than to be angry with his
child for forcing him to give up driving.
"Restricting an elderly person's driving
sets up such a breach in the family, at a time when the elderly
person needs support the most."
The Suroffs welcome Cento's support.
"Never once did I have any animosity or hatred
towards these people," said Sheldon Suroff, Jason's father.
"I just felt that Guy Lange slipped through
the system somewhere. I'm trying to seal the loopholes."
The Suroffs' campaign is not aimed at elderly
drivers, but at incompetent drivers of any age. The couple is
meeting with state legislators this week to begin drafting a
law that would require periodic road tests for all drivers,
with more frequent testing for elderly drivers.
Missouri has 26 drivers over age 100; the
oldest licensed driver is 107. And there are 5,289 licensed
drivers in their 90s. Under current law, drivers are given a
road test and a written examination only once when they get
their initial licenses.
Sheldon Suroff says he understands the quandary
Lange's family faced when Guy Lange refused to give up his keys.
Suroff confiscated his own father's keys the day he was found
sitting behind the wheel of his parked his car in the middle
of a street.
"I know what Alzheimer's does, and I feel
sorry for any family that has to deal with it," Suroff said.
"But I also feel cheated that somebody somewhere didn't recognize
Lange's condition earlier and get him off the road.
"And I feel so sorry for my son that that
he was in the wrong place at the wrong time."
