The Department of Motor Vehicles, which originally said the driver in the crash that killed him and four other teens in Newport Beach had no license and his application was pending, now corrects that Abdulrahman Alyahyan did have a 90-day provisional license.
The thing is, adds the DMV, it expired two weeks before the Memorial Day tragedy.
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He applied for a license after his 16th birthday in 2012, but the Saudi Arabia-born teen didn't provide required documentation proving his legal presence in the U.S. Alyahyan tried again in February, after turning 17, and had his picture taken by the DMV.
But the agency originally could find no evidence he had ever been issued a provisional license, until discovering he had–and that it had expired–after a more thorough search.
As previously reported, Alyahyan was cited April 20 for violating terms of a provisional license, which included illegal modifications to his Infiniti G35.
Newport Beach police have said speed was a factor when Alyahyan drove into a Jamboree Road tree, killing him; Robin Cabrera, 17; Aurora Cabrera, 16; Cecilia Zamora, 17; and Nozad Al Hamawendi,17, all of Irvine.
Newport Beach Mayor Keith Curry has told members of the media he heard the Infiniti sedan may have been going almost twice the legal speed limit, which was 55 miles per hour.
That has led to some speculation that Alyahyan was racing a second, unknown car that left the scene after the accident. Asked about this possibility, a Newport Beach Police spokeswoman told the Weekly she could not comment on a pending investigation.
A macabre development that sprang from the tragedy came from the grandmother of the Cabrera sisters, who told KCBS/Channel 2 she tracked the car via GPS on her and one of her granddaughters' cell phones. It showed the girl going from the accident scene to multiple hospitals to, finally, the coroner's office.
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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.