Leniency Of MD Driving Laws Highlighted By Case Of Truck Driver Who Killed Bethesda Woman

BETHESDA, MD — The spotlight was placed on the nation's driving laws this week when a judge sentenced a truck driver who ran over and killed a Bethesda woman who was riding her bicycle in a legal manner to a fine of $2,000 and up to 150 hours of community service.

Santos Reyes Martinez pleaded guilty to causing death while operating a motor vehicle in the August 2022 crash that killed Sarah Langenkamp in Bethesda. The penalties he received, which also included the possible suspension of his driver's license for between seven days and six months, were the maximum possible under Maryland law.

“You don’t feel that justice has been done because the penalties just don’t exist,” Langenkamp’s husband, Daniel, told NBC4 on Monday after the sentencing of Reyes Martinez.

Sarah Langenkamp had worked as a foreign service officer with the U.S. State Department for 17 years and had returned to the D.C. area with her husband and their two sons shortly before her death.

On Aug. 25, 2022, Langenkamp was riding her bicycle home from Wood Acres Elementary School in Bethesda, where her two sons attend. As she rode along River Road, a flatbed truck struck and killed Langenkamp even though her bicycle was in a clearly marked, yet unprotected, bike lane where commercial traffic competes with cyclists for space.

With the case now over against Reyes Martinez, Daniel Langenkamp said he will continue to focus on making road safety changes and enacting stiffer penalties for those who are involved in deadly crashes.

READ ALSO: Ride For Your Life To Honor Bethesda Woman Killed While Riding Bike

"Tragic cases like this one rightly garner the headlines," Radd Seiger, an international crisis and legal expert, told Patch. "When looked at through the prism of the victim's family’s eyes, we are astonished that such little value can be placed on human life and that a careless driver appears to be able to kill a vulnerable road user and yet effectively be able to walk away scot-free and resume a normal life as if nothing had happened."

But Seiger, co-founder and principal of Confluence Crisis Management Services, said the problem runs much deeper and wider. The U.S. has one of the worst road safety records of any wealthy nation in the world. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the U.S. death rate of 11.1 per 100,000 people is 2.3 times higher than other wealthy countries, with tens of thousands of people being killed or seriously injured on the roads each year.

"The reasons for this terrible record are complex, but chief among them are cultural attitudes and a failure by the justice systems to ensure appropriate accountability," he said. "The sheer frequency of these tragedies leads us to become inured to them and to not treat the issue of safety for all as a priority."

It's no coincidence that compared to its counterpart countries globally "who operate rules-based legal systems, the U.S. penalty codes for bad driving are unduly lenient," Seiger said.

While the penalties vary from state to state, with few exceptions, drivers who cause death through or serious injury through carelessness rather than dangerous recklessness are treated as if their actions "are just one of those things," he said.

"These are not of course 'accidents' at all. Accidents are incidents that are not preventable. They are entirely preventable crashes and collisions which would not have occurred had the driver been driving to the appropriate standard," Seiger stated.

The U.K., where Seiger lives, recently decided to increase its penalties for causing death by dangerous driving — the equivalent to vehicular homicide in the U.S. — to a maximum of life imprisonment.

"Even those causing death by careless driving now face imprisonment of a maximum of five years. Mrs. Langenkamp’s killer would have fallen into the latter category, and certainly would not have been allowed to walk away a free man," he said.

Seiger serves as an adviser and spokesman for the family of Harry Dunn, a British teenager who was struck and killed on his motorcycle by Anne Sacoolas, an American intelligence official who drove head-on into Dunn’s motorcycle in August 2019 near RAF Croughton, a military base in England.

At the courthouse in Maryland on Monday, Daniel Langenkamp told NBC4 that he is "not flabbergasted at the lawyer or the prosecutor or the judge — they did their jobs, the police did their job. But the law in this case is just unbelievable."

The $2,000 fine, the 150 hours of community service and as few as seven days of driver's license suspension for Reyes Martinez — the maximum possible penalties under Maryland law —are "just mind-blowingly lenient," Langenkamp said.

Seiger noted that Scandinavian countries have some of the safest roads in the world but also have the toughest driver education and testing programs, coupled with serious penalties for causing death or serious injury through bad driving.

"In short, they take the issue of road safety for all far more seriously than the rest of us," he said.

Most victims' families are reasonable people. "They do not expect an eye for an eye, nor do they want to ruin the driver’s or their family’s life either on top of their own misery," he said.

Also, a distinction obviously has to be drawn between crashes caused by the worst types of dangerous driving such as speeding, driving under the influence, or use of a cell phone, and those incidents caused by inadvertence, according to Seiger.

"What any decent country has to have is a holistic program of safety like our Scandinavian friends have where safety is an absolute priority over anything else and the rules ensure that there will be appropriate accountability when crashes like the one Mrs. Langenkamp suffered," he said. "Imagine living in a society that does not guarantee that as a minimum. One can only sympathize with the Langenkamps and their calls for change."

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