Placer County prosecutors wanted any information the California Department of Motor Vehicles had on Kostas Linardos, who drove a three-ton pickup truck at high speed into the back of a sedan in late 2022, killing a toddler.
The district attorney’s office, which charged Linardos with felony vehicular manslaughter, already obtained records showing he had at least 16 traffic violations — including speeding, reckless driving and street racing — and was
in at least four collisions before the fatal crash, court records show.
But they also learned that the DMV renewed his license barely a year after the DA’s office filed charges.
Prosecutors were interested in anything he might have said at a hearing to get his license or any records the agency dug up as part of its investigation of the crash.
Surely, the DMV did some sort of review before deciding it was safe to let Linardos stay on the road.
Right?
The DMV spent close to a year fighting to keep the answer to that a secret, refusing to release information on Linardos without a court order and then urging a judge not to issue such a decree. The agency’s lawyer argued in a filing that prosecutors wanted records “for the improper purpose of smearing the DMV for alleged and unfounded wrongdoing.”
Prosecutors said they wanted the DMV records to help show Linardos knew the risks of driving recklessly, which is something they needed to prove to make a felony vehicular manslaughter charge stick.
When the issue finally made it to court this year, the attorney representing the agency made a shocking admission: The DMV had no records of any investigation into a longtime reckless driver who killed a 23-month-old boy. The agency didn’t even appear to have held a hearing before deciding it was fine to let Linardos stay on the road.
Placer prosecutors’ quest for answers underscores how little action the state takes against deadly drivers.
Though state law authorizes the DMV to investigate drivers involved in a crash that kills or badly injures someone, agency records suggest the DMV rarely uses that power. Data provided to CalMatters show that, from 2022 through 2024, the agency opened just 3,300 investigations into drivers for their role in a fatal or serious-injury crash, a time in which California tallied nearly 56,000 such collisions.
Placer County District Attorney Morgan Gire said he believes that the DMV officials have fought so hard to keep the records secret because they “will reveal that there are so many drivers out there that have caused so much damage to our society — that the DMV could have been more active in preventing.”
“There is either moral culpability or legal liability on them,” he said, “and they are actively seeking to prevent that from being disclosed.”
CalMatters’ ongoing investigation, License to Kill, has shown that the DMV — under Gov. Gavin Newsom’s handpicked director — routinely lets drivers with horrific records of reckless behavior stay behind the wheel until it’s too late. And the agency often does nothing even after they kill.
The DMV declined an interview request for this story but did answer some questions in writing.
“Regarding Kostas Linardos, we appreciate you bringing this to our attention. The DMV has opened an investigation on the incident and the underlying facts,” wrote spokesperson Eva Spiegel.
Marc T. Vukcevich, director of state policy for the advocacy group Streets For All, said “it’s astonishing” how rarely the agency investigates drivers who kill or hurt people.
Residents of California have to swallow exorbitant vehicle registration fees and the hassle of dealing with the DMV. They should be able to assume that the agency is at least doing what it can to keep them safe, he said.
“That’s just a total failure of the state,” Vukcevich said.
Perhaps no driver better illustrates California’s inability — or unwillingness — to get dangerous drivers off the road than Kostas Linardos.
Linardos was driving a Ram 2500 pickup truck during morning rush hour one Wednesday in November 2022 when he tried to merge onto Interstate 80 in Roseville. Prosecutors allege that instead of safely merging onto the highway, Linardos floored it and cut across the “gore” — the painted triangle separating the on-ramp from the right lane of freeway traffic.
But there was a car stopped there. A woman had pulled off the freeway after the tire on her VW Jetta blew. Her son was in his car seat.
Linardos hit the back of her sedan at full acceleration going 73 miles per hour, demolishing the vehicle, according to law enforcement records filed in court. The child died.
Investigators looking into the crash dug up his lengthy record of roadway violations. They also found dashcam footage in the truck that they believed showed Linardos driving recklessly at other times — tailgating, abruptly changing lanes at high speed and seemingly screaming at other drivers who were “making him late,” according to a police report in the case file.
Linardos’s attorney, Mark Axup, declined to comment for this story because of the pending criminal charges against his client.
Days after CalMatters featured the Linardos case in an article, Deputy District Attorney Kyle Hasapes sent the DMV a subpoena for information.
Hasapes later said, according to court records, that he was hoping the agency’s files would help him show Linardos acted with “gross negligence” — a technical legal standard he needed to prove in the case. Prosecutors have to show that Linardos knew the risks of unsafe driving and decided to drive recklessly anyway. Anything Linardos might have said to the agency could help.
The DA’s office declined to make Hasapes available for an interview because the criminal case against Linardos is still open. This account is based on the voluminous court record — including emails Hasapes wrote to DMV officials — and hearing transcripts.
Two weeks after the subpoena, the agency sent Hasapes a single-page printout purportedly showing Linardos’s driving record. No violations, no suspensions and only one “accident” — the fatal 2022 collision — were listed. But the DMV record made no sense. Prosecutors already had 14 pages of records showing Linardos’s lengthy history behind the wheel. Those records also indicated that the agency years earlier suspended his license for negligent driving.
So after the initial one-page response, Hasapes followed up with emails and calls to the agency.
“I am so sorry to bother you as I am sure you have many other things to be doing with your time,” Hasapes wrote in an email to a DMV attorney. “I am in a bit of a quandary because I have been unsuccessful in obtaining records from DMV.”
It didn’t help.
The agency refused to turn over a certified copy of Linardos’s full driving record, which Hasapes needed to be able to submit as evidence in court. He also struggled to get a straight answer from the DMV as to what — if anything — it did after Linardos killed a child. The agency told him it couldn’t find any additional records pertaining to Linardos and that it might have destroyed them — if they ever did exist — because they were beyond the agency’s 12-month retention period for hearing records, case filings show.
So, Hasapes took the agency to court.
“I don’t know what the DMV has, which is why I have asked for everything,” Hasapes told Superior Court Judge Michael Jones, according to a transcript of a January hearing.
Marie Yelavich, the DMV’s attorney, argued that Hasapes never should have even gotten Linardos’s full driving record, which the agency considers to be confidential without a court order. (Hasapes told the judge that law enforcement obtained the uncertified record from a DMV employee and expressed concern that the person who provided it could face a reprimand from the agency for turning it over.)
Yelavich also said that the DMV doesn’t keep many records. Among the records Hasapes wanted, for example, were any letters the DMV sent Linardos warning him that he was in danger of having his driving privileges suspended. Such a warning might help show that he should have known his behavior behind the wheel was dangerous.
But Yelavich said the agency’s computer system automatically sends the warnings and doesn’t keep copies, “so there are no responsive records there to provide.”
“Don’t say that too loud,” Judge Jones quipped in response. “They don’t want the public to know that there’s no record of anything that’s being sent out for them.”
Hasapes expressed skepticism that the DMV was searching its records and turning over everything in good faith.
“I am being told that an entire file has been purged while it would have been known to everybody involved that a criminal case for the death of a 23-month-old had been opened,” Hasapes said.
In an interview, Gire said that it’s normal for his office to seek records from government agencies and that such requests rarely end up in a fight. He called the DMV’s response “flabbergasting.”
“This case is about a toddler who was killed senselessly by someone who never should have been behind the wheel in the first place, and the DMV knew that,” Gire said.
“The fact that we are engaged in all of this litigation over these records means justice is ultimately delayed and denied to this family as we play these needless legal games that the DMV is insisting we play,” he said.
The judge ultimately sided with prosecutors and in late January ordered the agency to turn over what it has.
The DMV’s inaction after the fatal crash was no aberration.
CalMatters’ previous reporting found that dangerous drivers stay on the road for many reasons. The state’s point system is full of holes. Its DUI laws are among the weakest in the country. And for many vehicular manslaughter charges and convictions, there is no automatic license suspension.
That means it’s often up to the DMV to decide whether to act. Routinely, it doesn’t.
California’s vehicle code says the DMV “ may conduct an investigation ” when a driver is involved in a crash in which someone is hurt or dies and revoke the subject’s driving privileges. CalMatters asked for records of such investigations to understand the extent to which the agency uses this authority.
In response, the agency said via email that it investigates every driver who contributes to such a crash or whose culpability law enforcement wasn’t able to determine.
The DMV’s data shows it opened about 3,300 “negligent operator cases” from 2022 through 2024 against drivers involved in fatal or serious-injury collisions.
Yet, California recorded nearly 55,500 fatal or serious-injury collisions in those three years, according to state data available from the Safe Transportation Research and Education Center at UC Berkeley. That suggests the state opens a driver investigation in just 6 percent of crashes where someone is badly hurt or dies.
We have tried for almost two years to get the agency to explain the discrepancy between the number of investigations and the volume of crashes.
Initially, agency officials said they couldn’t comment on the university-published statistics and offered speculation that might explain some of the gap, but certainly not all. A drunken driver who hits a tree and dies, for example, wouldn’t be investigated by the DMV. Neither would a hit-and-run driver who is never identified.
In their response to questions for this story, the DMV still didn’t explain the numbers. The agency said it couldn’t make anyone available before publication.
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This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.
