Sudden acceleration may have caused ’04 accident that killed LV couple
George Yago III has been waiting six years to find out why his parents’ car took a deadly plunge off a downtown Las Vegas parking garage.
The police don’t have an answer. Neither do federal investigators.
The Yagos’ car accelerated forward “for unknown reasons,” the Metro Police report said. The feds said much the same. The Clark County coroner floated a theory that a stroke caused Yago’s 83-year-old father to force his foot down on the accelerator, but the autopsy was inconclusive.
The son, who knew his father had been in reasonably good health, tried to make peace with the idea that he would never know what went wrong.
Then, last year, deadly runaway Toyotas started getting national news coverage.
George Yago Jr. and his 79-year-old wife, Maureen Yago, had died in a 2002 Toyota Camry.
On Jan. 22, 2004, the banking industry retirees were meeting a relative for brunch at the Golden Nugget. As they drove onto the garage’s fourth floor, the Yagos were trailed by two motorists who saw the Toyota’s brake lights as the Yagos pulled into a space. One witness even told Metro Police he saw the Yagos’ car come to a complete stop — right before it suddenly accelerated and slammed through the cement panel wall at the head of the parking stall.
The white sedan flew over the edge, hit power lines, flipped trunk-over-hood in midair and landed on its roof in the alley below.
And today, as automotive safety experts campaign for an expanded recall of Camrys to include older models like the Yagos’, they cite what happened to the Las Vegas couple at the Golden Nugget parking garage.
Whether the Yagos’ vehicle was to blame for their deaths remains undetermined. But auto safety experts and consumer advocates say it can’t be ruled out because federal investigators weren’t thorough enough and lacked technical know-how about the brake systems in question. Had they more exhaustively investigated the crash, regulators might have caught on to Toyota’s problems sooner. Other crashes might have been prevented. Other lives might have been saved.
