The 80-year-old woman that prosecutors found responsible for a car crash that killed a family of four in San Francisco has been sentenced to two years of probation and will have her driver’s license suspended.
Lau will receive no jail time and will not be subject to home confinement. As part of her sentence, she must complete 200 hours of community service.
Mary Fong Lau, 80, was driving at speeds of up to 70mph, prosecutors said, when she slammed into a bus shelter on 16 March 2024. Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, 40, and his one-year-old son, Joaquim Ramos Pinto de Oliveira, were killed immediately. Matilde Moncada Ramos Pinto, 38, and three-month-old Cauê Ramos Pinto de Oliveira were taken to hospital and died days later.
Lau pleaded no contest to charges against her, which means that while she did not admit guilt, she did waive her right to a trial and allowed the court to treat her as if she was guilty for the purposes of sentencing.
The crash had become a flashpoint for locals after San Francisco superior court judge Bruce Chan indicated he was unlikely to impose prison time on Lau, citing her remorse over the deaths and the fact that her husband had also died in a car accident early in their marriage.
“My feeling is that just as this family is forever imprisoned in the grief and the tragedy, Ms Lau is also going to spend the rest of her days living with the knowledge of the harm that she caused to so many others,” Chan said in court.
Seth Morris, Lau’s attorney, said Lau carried “lifelong grief” from being widowed at 25, when husband died in a car crash. He said Lau was “deeply remorseful” and “irrevocably altered” by the bus shelter crash.
Lau told police she did not know what happened and could not stop right before the crash, according to court documents.
Relatives of those killed in the San Francisco crash collected more than 8,000 signatures on a petition urging Chan to impose “meaningful consequences proportionate to the gravity of this crime,” including taking away the woman’s driver’s license, mandating community service and other restrictions to “protect the community”.
In October, the city completed a redesign of the bus terminal in San Francisco’s West Portal neighborhood, where the crash occurred. The city erected new barriers, a bike-share station and polka-dot street murals designating pedestrian zones in order to provide safer and “more welcoming access” for the 5,000 daily riders at West Portal, according to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency.
But some advocates remain concerned about the number of pedestrian fatalities in the city. Last month, a driver struck and killed a two-year-old girl crossing the street in San Francisco’s Mission Bay neighborhood. It was the third pedestrian death in the city this year so far.
