An immigration lawyer pleaded guilty Tuesday to crashing her car into a bicyclist and killing him while driving under the influence of prescription drugs that included Xanax and Suboxone.
Hasti Fakhrai-Bayrooti, 41, of Rancho Santa Margarita, copped to felony vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and now faces up to four years in state prison at her sentencing scheduled for May 8 in Newport Beach. Orange County sheriff's deputies arrested her on Sept. 23, 2013, which was after crime lab blood results were in from the crash that happened six months before.
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Hasti Fakhrai-Bayrooti, Immigration Lawyer, to be Arraigned in Fatal DUI Crash with Bicyclist
Around 6:45 p.m. on March 15, 2013, Fakhrai-Bayrooti was driving south on Santa Margarita Parkway between El Toro Road and Los Alisos Boulevard in Mission Viejo, where she allegedly swerved into the bike lane and 54-year-old bicyclist Eric Billings, who rolled over her vehicle's hood and windshield and later died from multiple traumatic injuries.
At the time, Bayrooti was an active member of the State Bar of California.
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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.