Murder Charge Upheld in Insurance Scam Case : Courts: Judge orders trial for driver of car in which passenger died. Suspect is accused of staging accident with a truck to collect money.

The driver of a car involved in an allegedly planned freeway collision with a truck last June in Sun Valley was ordered Tuesday to stand trial on murder charges related to the death of one of his passengers.

Jorge Sanchez, 30, is believed to be the first person in the nation tried on charges of second-degree murder in a death resulting from a purported automobile insurance scam.

According to reports from witnesses and investigators, Sanchez swerved many times and applied his brakes in front of a car carrier truck on the Golden State Freeway on June 17, causing the truck to flip over and crush the back of the car. Car passenger Jose Luis Lopez Perez, 29, was killed.

The case is one of five in Los Angeles courts involving 20 defendants charged with provoking freeway wrecks with large trucks in an attempt to collect insurance money.

Investigators have characterized the practice, first noticed by California Highway Patrol officers this year, as a particularly dangerous and desperate escalation of more common deliberate crashes on city streets. They believe that the trucks were targeted by insurance fraud rings because they typically carry more liability insurance than passenger cars and they are easier to draw into a wreck because of their size.

Searches of suspects’ apartments and glove compartments turned up wreck “scripts” that laid out roles and actions for some crashes. In one case, investigators found that the back of a station wagon used in a crash had been filled with tires to absorb the impact.

During the eight-day preliminary hearing on the murder case, defense attorneys sought to prove that the June 17 crash was an unplanned and unfortunate accident.

However, Municipal Court Judge Michael E. Pastor said he had concluded that the only innocent victim was the truck driver. Sanchez’s actions were not merely negligent, Pastor said, but “intentional, purposeful, willful and wanton.”

The dead man, Lopez Perez, was previously identified as one of the fraud ring’s organizers, although his relatives say the day laborer and father of two would never have knowingly taken such risks.

The judge said he believed that Sanchez “clearly disregarded the safety of other lives on the freeway, not only of the passengers in his car and the big-rig driver, but everyone else who was driving on the freeway that day.”

However, Pastor said he did not find the evidence presented by Deputy Dist. Atty. Barry Thorpe as convincing with regard to the two surviving passengers, who also had been charged with murder. Pastor ruled that Rubidia Lopez, 27, and Isiais Antonio Aguilar Martinez, 24, should be tried only on charges of insurance fraud because the judge was not sure they realized how dangerous the crime would be.

Thorpe said he disagreed with the reduced charges but did not know if the district attorney’s office would refile murder charges in Superior Court.

In many of the alleged scams, investigators believe that passengers were recruited days or even hours before the crash, sometimes paid as little as $25 to risk their lives. The ringleaders, also known as cappers, stood to collect thousands of dollars in insurance claims for each passenger, proceeds that investigators believe were rarely shared with the participants.

Attorneys for Lopez and Martinez hailed the judge’s decision to drop the murder charges and maintained that their clients also are innocent of insurance fraud, which carries a maximum sentence of five years.

Rand Steve Rubin, attorney for Lopez, said his client believed that she was getting a ride to an immigration counselor at the time of the accident. Timothy C. Lannen, Martinez’s attorney, reiterated that the Salvadoran had only been in this country three days at the time of the crash.

Bail was reduced to $100,000 for Lopez and Martinez but remained at $5 million for Sanchez.

State and local investigators believe that there were at least six fraud rings operating on Los Angeles freeways during the last year. In mid-July they said they expected at least 70 more arrests. However, on Tuesday, Thorpe said no additional cases have been filed.

In one of the largest cases, which involves 10 defendants, Thorpe said one man has pleaded guilty to insurance fraud. But the man suspected of being the capper--Miguel Antonio Morales, 26--failed to appear at a preliminary hearing and a warrant was issued for his arrest.

Authorities continue to try to trace the ringleaders. Files were seized from two attorneys’ offices in July but no arrests were made.

After the wreck that killed Lopez Perez, 23-year-old Oscar Lopez Portillo was arrested when a used car salesman identified him as the buyer of the car in which Lopez Perez died. Portillo confessed to planning another truck crash in May and identified the ringleader as Filamon Santiago, authorities said. Highway Patrol officers have been unable to locate Santiago.