Criminal charges and a lawsuit seek justice for a slain bicyclist’s family.

Seth Pollack was very much alive and well on the morning of Friday, Dec. 5, when he set out for his usual morning bike ride from his home in Monterey through Pebble Beach. It was a clear, sunny day. He wore a helmet, like he always did.

He was riding down 17-Mile Drive in the right-hand lane, crossing the intersection with Crespi Lane at 9:15am. An SUV was heading the opposite direction on 17-Mile Drive and making a left turn onto Crespi, across Pollack’s path. If the driver, Dana Rene Lauchlan, had seen the biker, she would have waited a minute and everyone would have gone about their day and their life. But Lauchlan told CHP officers that with the sun in her eyes she did not notice him and made her left turn directly in his path. She felt the impact, she said, without even realizing what had happened, and she did not know what or whom she had struck. Pollack had been launched into the air over her windshield, crashed through the sunroof and landed in the backseat where he died within minutes from blunt force injuries that fractured his spine, left femur, a right rib and more.

The details of his injuries and the crash that killed him are spelled out in the Monterey County Coroner’s report and in the CHP’s final report, completed on Feb. 19 by Officer Ryan Moore. Moore recommended the District Attorney charge Lauchlan with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter, and on March 6, the DA did just that, sending her a citation.

She is scheduled to be arraigned on April 8; if convicted, the maximum sentence for this crime is one year in prison and one year on probation.

The documents that reveal this order of events, what happened and how, are standard-issue in the criminal justice system, devoid of any emotion. They are all pieces of a process, with nameless figures (Vehicle #1 and Vehicle #2) although of course they underpin the intensely emotional reality of grief for families, individuals and for a community.

Pollack, 66, retired in 2022 from a 25-year career at CSU Monterey Bay. He was the first faculty director hired at CSUMB’s Service Learning Institute, bringing students into the community to volunteer and learn through direct action assisting service organizations. As he said shortly before he died: “I teach people how to be a mensch in the world.”

“I teach people how to be a mensch in the world.”

Lauchlan declined to be interviewed for this story, but undoubtedly she is grieving too. Not only must she endure a fatal mistake she made, but her husband of 38 years, Michael James Lauchlan, died at 63 from cancer at their home in Pebble Beach on Sept. 26, just two-and-a-half months before the crash, according to an obituary.

Any of us who drive a car must admit we have done stupid or careless things, lost our focus for a minute or turned blindly into the sun and hoped for the best. Her error will haunt everyone involved forever.

This is true of every collision when a driver kills someone, an unrelenting reminder that decisions we casually make every day can result in life or death. On Monday, March 16 the surviving family members – two sons and three daughters – of Yuriana Lopez Reyes sued the driver who killed her, at age 42, while she was walking across the street in Salinas on Nov. 5, 2024.

The next day, March 17, Pollack’s widow, Naomi Pollack, filed suit against Lauchlan for wrongful death and negligence. In a statement, the Pollack family writes, “Seth Pollack spent his life teaching people how to see clearly – to look past easy narratives, sit with complexity, and do the hard work of understanding. It is a painful irony that in the days after his death, the story of how he died became one of those easy, inaccurate narratives.”

They are referring to a CHP statement immediately following the crash that Pollack was on the wrong side of the street, later determined to be unfounded. CHP spokesperson Jaskaran Bhaurla says this kind of discrepancy between a first impression and a final investigation is normal. “There’s always follow-up that needs to be done,” he says. “That’s why we say, ‘It’s an ongoing investigation… we are going to investigate it to its fullest,’ which is what the officer did.”

The story may be corrected – and of course, Lauchlan will have her day in court to tell a different version of events – but the loss cannot and never will be corrected.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@montereycountynow.com