I-TEAM: Loophole For Uninsured Drivers

By ABC-7 Reporter/Anchor Maria Garcia

EL PASO, Texas — Despite efforts from state and local leaders to curb the number of uninsured drivers, some offenders are still slipping through the cracks.

Between Oct. 1 of last year and this year, police cited 52,972 people for driving without insurance, up from 51,263 the year before.

That is why El Paso leaders implemented a new instant impound ordinance that lets police tow your car if you don’t have insurance.

Since it took effect Sunday, the company that handles the impounds has taken in about 75 cars.

But there are still some who manage to get away with not getting coverage.

One woman told ABC-7 about her encounter with a driver who took advantage of an insurance loophole.

“I didn’t really know what was going on or what to do. I had never been in an accident like that, I was really shocked,” said Lindsay Huseby, whose car was totalled after a wreck in May on Sunland Park Drive.

“A big F-150 came and I was driving a little Cavalier and he smashed into the rear end of me and then he hit the truck next to him and I hit the car in front of me, so it was a big four-car accident.”

After the initial shock, Huseby approached the driver who had caused the wreck.

“I go over and he’s already handing the insurance out the window, pretending like he’s real hurt and he doesn’t want to talk to me and he’s giving me this piece of paper, and the police take it,” she said.

Huseby was relieved — at least he had insurance. She was wrong.

A few days after the wreck Huseby received a letter in the mail from Fred Loya Insurance. It said Angel Berumen, Jr., the 24-year-old Anthony, N.M., man later convicted of causing the crash, was specifically excluded from the policy, so the insurance company wouldn’t cover her damages. The policy only covered Berumen’s sister, the owner of the truck.

So why did the El Paso police officers accept the insurance at the time of the crash?

ABC-7 found that state law says that if an owner of a vehicle takes out an insurance policy, then the people who live in their household, even if they are not named in the policy, are covered and can drive the car.

But the law also allows for insurance policies to exclude drivers, making it easy for someone like Berumen to present an insurance policy that doesn’t cover him

“In this particular case, what is required by law was met,” said El Paso Police Department spokesman Javier Sambrano.

And the insurance databases where officers can check the validity of an insurance policy is not able to help in cases like this. An officer can check if a policy is active but can’t check which drivers are covered, so there was no way for the officer at the scene to check that Berumen was excluded from the policy.

ABC-7 looked at Berumen’s driving record in both Texas and New Mexico and found why he may have been excluded from the policy.

In just seven years, Berumen has been cited 19 times – twice for lack of insurance, four times for speeding, three times for not wearing a seatbelt and once for racing. Berumen was found guilty or pleaded guilty for most of the charges.

What’s worse, at the time Berumen crashed into Huseby’s car in May, he shouldn’t have been driving. New Mexico officials suspended his license in February for not paying a ticket, and even though the El Paso police officer at the crash could have looked it up on a national database, he didn’t.

“We can’t be necessarily using that for every single stop or every single case that we’re out there, there’s computer glitches, it takes away time the officer could be patrolling the streets, and ultimately it depends on their judgement. It’s just too much time,” Sambrano said.

ABC-7 went to Berumen’s home in Anthony where he is a licensed electrical contractor. A woman who identified herself as Berumen’s mother said he does not live there any more, and there was no answer at the phone number she gave us.

“Why don’t they catch him doing that, why don’t they take him in and how does he always slip through the cracks?” said Huseby.

Huseby is still angry about what happened. She went to the city prosecutor’s office and served as a witness in the city’s no insurance case against Berumen. She waited in court for three hours but Berumen never showed.

“I put a lot of my time into this and he’s just getting away scot free,” Huseby said.

In the end, he paid a $325 find to the city for lack of insurance but not a dime for Huseby’s unusable car and medical bills for a fractured rib, joining the thousands of uninsured drivers who get away with it on El Paso’s streets.

If you are hit by an uninsured driver, you can do what Huseby did and check if you can serve as a witness in their trial, and you can also take the uninsured driver to civil court to try to recover damages.