By Linda Taaffe
The retired Mountain View pediatrician charged with hit-and-run last February after striking a 6-year-old bicyclist with his car allegedly stopped to aid the boy, according to a witness whose testimony was not included in the initial police report.
Dr. George Kirn, 80, is facing state prison and suspension of his driver’s license for fleeing the accident at the intersection of Miramonte Avenue and Covington Road in Los Altos. He pleaded no contest to the misdemeanor charges last March when no one could corroborate his story.
The new testimony from the previously unknown witness was enough incentive for Kirn to ask for the charges to be dismissed or to change his plea to innocent. He is scheduled to appear in Superior Court Friday.
“We heard the story and thought … maybe he didn’t really get out of the car all the way, or he didn’t remember the accident clearly. We talked him into pleading guilty. They were going to take away his license. He was going to give it up anyway. Because it wasn’t a big deal, we told him to plead guilty,” his son Tim Kirn said regretfully.
Kirn struck the boy on Covington as he pedaled his bike across Miramonte behind his father, according to Los Altos police. Kirn was on Miramonte making a left turn onto Covington. The impact allegedly catapulted the boy onto Kirn’s hood, police said. The boy was taken to Stanford Hospital and released with no injuries, according to police.
Witnesses told police that Kirn stopped briefly before driving away. One witness followed Kirn and tried to convince him to return to the scene. Kirn refused and drove away, according to police. The district attorney’s office issued a warrant for Kirn’s arrest a month later. Kirn drove himself to the police station.
Kirn told his children that he had stopped, gotten out of the car and checked the child for injuries. There was no damage to the bike or the child, he said. The child had fallen from the bike, but the impact had not sent him onto the car hood. Tim said that the police report confirms the bike was not damaged and Kirn was technically not at fault. The father and the boy rode into the intersection out of turn.
After checking the child, who appeared uninjured in Kirn’s medical opinion, he believed the matter had been resolved and drove away.
In the account given by Los Altos resident Dr. Constance Bowie, who witnessed the event but whose testimony was never included in the police record, she corroborates Kirn’s story. Bowie was waiting at the four-way stop at Covington when Kirn hit the boy.
“The father was very angry and walked quickly to the car with the child on his hip. The father was yelling at the driver, who by that time had exited his vehicle and was approaching the father and child,” Bowie said. “The father was yelling, ‘Didn’t you see him, didn’t you see him?’ The driver said ‘No,’ and reached out and touched the boy on the back and said, ‘I’m sorry, baby.’”
Bowie said the boy did not appear to be injured.
She said the father then turned around and told Kirn to be more careful.
“(This) made it clear to me that the interchange between father and driver was over,” Bowie said. As Kirn walked to his car, the father asked Bowie for a ride home.
At that point, a woman, who identified herself as an emergency room nurse at Stanford Hospital, instructed the father to lay his child down and call 911, according to Bowie’s account.
Someone noted that the motorist had driven away and left to track him down, Bowie said.
Kirn provided the witness his name, address and telephone number but did not return to the accident scene, Tim said.
“He refused to go back — I assume because the (boy’s) father was so abusive,” Tim said.
Bowie said she gave police her name and telephone number but could not stay long enough to give a statement that day. After reading what she called “misleading accounts” in the media, Bowie contacted police and wrote a letter to the district attorney. Los Altos police never filed an additional police report, and the district attorney’s office did not file the letter until after Kirn entered his plea, according to Kirn’s attorney.
Tim said he was thankful for Bowie’s perseverance.
“He’s already (voluntarily) given up his license. His reputation has been dishonored in a way that has been unfair,” Tim said about his father, a longtime Mountain View resident who tended to hundreds of Bay Area children during his practice, including Medicaid patients during a time when almost no other pediatricians did so. Kirn has been active in the community, serving on the Los Altos School District Board in the early 1970s and as local chairman of the Mountain View Rotary Club’s polio immunization campaign.
