A Rancho Santa Margarita attorney who has been published about liberties denied due to closed deportation hearings is scheduled to be arraigned Tuesday on charges of killing a bicyclist with her car while buzzing on prescription drugs.
Hasti Fakhrai-Bayrooti, 39, is charged with a felony count of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated that could send her to state prison for four years with a conviction, according to prosecutors.
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Out of custody on $100,000 bail, Fakhari-Bayrooti is scheduled to be arraigned at 8:30 a.m. Tuesday in Santa Ana.
Around 6:45 p.m. on March 15, Fakhrai-Bayrooti was driving south on Santa Margarita Parkway in Mission Viejo after consuming prescription drugs, including Xanax and Suboxone, according to a statement from the Orange County District Attorney's office (OCDA).
Near the intersection of El Toro Road and Los Alisos Boulevard, she allegedly swerved into the bike lane, crashing into 54-year-old bicyclist Eric Billings, who rolled over her vehicle's hood and windshield and later died from multiple traumatic injuries, says the OCDA.
After blood evidence was analyzed, Orange County sheriff's deputies arrested Fakharai-Bayrooti on Sept. 23, 2013.
Online sites indicate she received her undergraduate degree from the University of Phoenix and her juris doctorate from Whittier College Law School. Go here to read her 2003 Whittier Law Review piece: “Note and Comment: Denial of Public Access to Deportation Hearings: Is It Protecting National Security or Violating Fundamental Liberties?”
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OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.