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Relative slams 90-day home-detention sentence in street-racing crash that orphaned twin girls
A then-teenage street racer who killed a couple in Redwood City and left their twin daughters without parents got 90 days of electronic monitoring with his parents, a sentence a relative of the victims is too light.
REDWOOD CITY, Calif. - A San Mateo County jury on Tuesday awarded $33 million to two 11-year-old twin girls whose parents were killed while driving their car in Redwood City and became tangled up in a street race.
Parents killed
What we know:
The verdict followed a three-week jury trial in which the jury heard evidence that Cesar Morales, then 17, was driving up to 110 mph on the night of the deaths of husband-and-wife, Greg Ammen and Grace Spiridon, on Nov. 4, 2022.
Morales had been racing another driver when he crashed into the family's car. The parents died and their twin girls, then 7, survived.
The girls were adopted by their aunt, who is the plaintiff in the case.
McCarthy called the parents "extraordinary people," who had dedicated themselves to their daughters and lived lives of service in the community.
The parents of Cesar Morales, Arnold Morales and Susana Salto Alvarez, were also found negligent in failing to prevent their son's conduct.
"We are hopeful today’s verdict serves as a wake-up call to Bay Area parents," Niall McCarthy, an attorney with Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, said. "You cannot ignore warning signs with your teenage children. Parents need to do more than simply provide a car and hope for the best. They need to act when it is apparent their child needs a course correction." McCarthy added, "Here, tragically, two young girls no longer have parents because of the Morales family’s decisions."
McCarthy added that this wasn't just an impulsive decision made by a teenage boy."
"That wasn't at all what happened here," he said. "The decisions that caused the deaths of these two people were made in the Morales family home in the months and years leading up to this. And there were a number of points where the parents could have taken action and this tragedy would have been avoided, including when the 17-year-old got a ticket for driving 108 miles an hour on the freeway, you know, a year before this. So there were all kinds of warning signs that were ignored."
The other side:
Philip Segal, an attorney for the parents, and Jeff Lusich, an attorney for Cesar Morales, did not immediately respond to the San Mateo Daily Journal's request for comment, but they had both argued in court that the parents should not be held liable for the crash.
Last year, Morales was sentenced to 90 days of home detention. The other driver, Kyle Harrison, pleaded no contest to vehicular manslaughter and to racing Morales. He was found dead in his jail cell in March 2025 after serving less than a month of his eight-year prison sentence.
It wasn't immediately clear how the Morales family would pay the $33 million.
McCarthy told KTVU that he was not allowed to get any information about the Morales’ finances prior to obtaining a judgment against them. But he said he guessed he would be able to recover a "significant" portion of the full amount.
"It is too early to assess how much of the judgment the parents can pay," he said.
The Source: Cotchett, Pitre & McCarthy, prior KTVU reporting, San Mateo Daily Journal