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About The daily Astorian. (Astoria, Or.) 1961-current | View Entire Issue (Feb. 7, 2018)
3A THE DAILY ASTORIAN • WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 2018 Oregon parents seek changes to hit-and-run law By PARIS ACHEN Capital Bureau SALEM — Anna Diet- er-Eckert, 6, and her sister Abi- gail Robinson, 11, were killed in a hit-and-run crash while playing in a pile of leaves in front of their Forest Grove home in 2013. On Tuesday, their parents asked state lawmakers to close a loophole in state law that led the Oregon Court of Appeals to overturn the conviction of the woman who hit the girls and left the scene. “In making this change, someone in the future already trying to survive their per- fect storm will not be faced with what we have had to go through over the last four years, years of reliving our tragedy,” said Susan Diet- er-Robinson, Anna’s mother and Abigail’s stepmother. “If the law changes, our girls will have had a small piece of mak- ing that happen.” State Reps. Jeff Barker, D-Aloha, and Andy Olson, R-Albany, co-sponsored a bill this year to modify the state’s hit-and-run law to require motorists who collide with something to stop and investi- gate what they struck. The bill also would require a motorist who has left a scene to notify authorities once they realize they had caused an injury or death. Forest Grove resident Cinthya Garcia, then 19, drove into a pile of leaves at the edge of a residential Forest Grove street at the prompting of her boyfriend and brother, who were passengers in the vehicle, Paris Achen/Capital Bureau Left to right, Tom Robinson and Susan Dieter-Robinson, parents of two little girls killed in a hit-and-run crash while they were playing in the leaves at their home in Forest Grove in 2013. To their right is Pam Olson, wife of Rep. Andy Olson, R-Albany, a co-sponsor of a bill to change the state’s hit-and-run law. according to court documents. It is believed that the young girls, who had been playing in the leaves, may have been hid- ing from view. Garcia later said knew that she had hit something, but she didn’t know what it was until later that day. About five min- utes after the girls were hit, one of the passengers rode his bike back to the scene. “He engaged with my hus- band who was frantic and in the process of calling 911,” Susan Dieter-Robinson said. “He rode his bike back home not even a half a block from the scene and told the driver and the other passenger what had happened. They hit two small children.” After finding out, they drove to Walmart and went and bought ice cream, Diet- er-Robinson said. “The next day, they washed the car, attempting to get rid of the evidence that may have still been there,” she said. Report: Sen. Kruse engaged in ‘unwelcome physical contact’ By CLAIRE WITHYCOMBE Capital Bureau SALEM — An outside investigator has found state Sen. Jeff Kruse engaged in a “longstanding pattern” of “unwelcome physical contact” with women in the workplace, despite warnings not to touch women at work. The investigator’s report was made public Tuesday, a little more than three months after the first allegations of unwanted touching, made by a fellow state senator, came to light. Kruse, R-Roseburg, could not be reached for comment Tuesday evening. Two sitting Democratic lawmakers — Sen. Sara Gelser, D-Corvallis, and Sen. Eliza- beth Steiner Hayward, D-Bea- verton — formally accused Kruse of unwanted touching last fall. Both Gelser and Steiner Hayward had previously raised informal complaints — which remain private — about Kruse’s conduct in 2016. Kruse was at the time warned to stop by legislative counsel and leg- islative Employee Services. “What is clear and undis- puted is that by March 3, 2016, Sen. Kruse was on notice that female senators had com- plained about him, and he was given specific guidelines about conduct to avoid with women in the workplace in the future,” wrote investigator Dian Rubanoff. “By his own admis- sion, Sen. Kruse chose not to make changes in his behav- ior because he did not know which females found his con- duct to be offensive, and he did not want to change his behav- ior with everyone.” The investigator inter- viewed several other women who worked in the Capitol who allege that the senator would hug them, stand too close, touch heads with them, and touch their bodies in ways that made them feel uncomfortable. The investigator also inter- viewed Kruse and his col- Timothy J. Gonzalez/Statesman Journal State Sen. Jeff Kruse is under fire for sexual harassment. leagues in the Senate. Kruse said he had “no rec- ollection” about many of the allegations, including spe- cific incidents reported by Gelser, but did not deny cer- tain other claims. For exam- ple, he acknowledged that he may have given a young staffer in his office “frontal hugs” and may have told her she was “sexy.” The investigator found that two young women who worked in his office in the 2017 legislative session had reported feeling uncomfortable due to his touching, and that a young lobbyist reported late last year that he had “cupped” her behind at an event at the gover- nor’s office in September. “Senator Kruse’s hugging and touching of women not only continued after the warn- ings he received, the evidence shows that the conduct actu- ally escalated during the 2017 session, at least with respect to the two law students assigned to his office,” Rubanoff wrote. In the conclusion to the report, Rubanoff said that she was “concerned that if Sen. Kruse is allowed to stay in the Legislature without specific conditions that he needs to sat- isfy, and if there is not a con- tinuing prospect of serious con- sequences if he fails to satisfy those conditions, he may ‘fall back into old patterns’ again.” Rubanoff also said she was worried about the “message that will be sent to women in the workplace regarding the futility of coming forward if there are not meaningful con- sequences about Sen. Kruse’s failure to heed the warnings he received” from legislative counsel and the legislature’s human resources officer after the first informal reports of inappropriate behavior were made in 2016. Gelser made the first public allegation of Kruse inappropri- ately touching her in October, followed by Steiner Hayward. Steiner Hayward declined to comment on the report through her office. Prior to the report’s public posting Tuesday, Gelser said in an email that she had not yet read the report and did not want to comment on it before reading it. The four-member Sen- ate Committee on Conduct, chaired by Sen. Mark Hass, D-Beaverton, will convene Feb. 22. The committee is tasked with recommending what action the Senate should take, if any, and then the Sen- ate as a whole will vote on the recommendation. In a public letter addressed to Kruse, Gelser and Steiner Hayward and posted on the Legislature’s website Tues- day evening, Hass said that the committee would take testi- mony from the investigator as well as the three senators. In November, legislative administration signed a con- tract with Rubanoff, an attor- ney with the Lake Oswego firm Peck, Rubanoff & Hatfield PC to investigate the allegations for $290 an hour. House Speaker Tina Kotek, D-Portland, said Monday that she thought that the Legisla- ture should reassess the way it handles formal complaints and investigations of harassment. “I think what we have seen in this whole complaint, the two complaints, is, we have a process that on paper sounded really good and is one of the model processes in the coun- try,” Kotek said. “It’s clunky. It’s moving as quickly as it can, but it’s just, there are some gaps, and I think we’ll have to reassess it after this whole thing runs its course.” The Capital Bureau is a col- laboration between EO Media Group and Pamplin Media Group. 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The Court of Appeals deci- sion to overturn Garcia’s con- viction of hit-and-run in May prompted the lawmakers to propose “Anna and Abigail’s Law.” The court identified a gap in the existing hit-and-run law when it issued its opinion, said Bracken McKey, a prosecu- tor in Washington County who prosecuted Garcia. “Think about Oregon’s hit- and-run law as the Court of Appeals has now defined it. You can be less than a block away and moments later in time when you know you have run over and seriously injured another person, you have zero responsibility to help them, no responsibility to call 911, no responsibility to take steps that might save a child’s life or at the very least lessen the emo- tional burden on a grieving family,” McKey said. “April and Abigail’s Law” would help the “most vulner- able, the cyclists, the jogger, the small child who’s chasing a ball and maybe the next lit- tle girl in a leaf pile,” he said. 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