As the contrite chief executive of General Motors deflected tough questions on Tuesday about deadly defects in GM cars, as stone-faced House members pressed the CEO for answers, Brooke Melton was still dead and gone, killed on her birthday in her 2005 Chevrolet Cobalt.
Melton, 29, a pediatric nurse, died in March 2010. She was driving up Ga. 92 in Paulding County to meet her boyfriend for a birthday dinner when the Cobalt’s ignition suddenly switched off, leaving Melton without power steering and other systems. Her car struck an oncoming vehicle, left the road and landed in a swollen creek.
As GM CEO Mary Barra prepared for her difficult appearance before the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Oversight, Melton’s father Ken was asked what he would say to Barra if he had the chance to speak with her.
“I will use their words,” he told the AJC in a phone interview from his Kennesaw home. “It was a business decision not to fix that ignition switch. That is their exact words. That infuriates me. My daughter’s dead because of a business decision that they made not to fix a problem that was known up to 10 years ago.”
Ken Melton and his wife, Beth, sued GM in 2011 and settled for an undisclosed sum last fall. They still have a case pending against a local Chevrolet dealership, where Brooke had taken the car for repairs because the ignition had switched off without warning. The day after she got the car back, her father said, she was killed.
The Meltons’ attorney, Lance Cooper of Marietta, said the turning point of the case against GM was an analysis of the Cobalt’s “black box,” which he said showed the ignition key had moved from the “run” position to the “accessory” position just before the impact.
“We thought originally it was a power steering problem,” he said. “Then there was a download of the black box of the vehicle, which showed the key was in the accessory position at the time of the crash, and three to four seconds before the crash, the RPMs of the engine went to zero.
“All of a sudden there was an explanation as to what happened: her key turned. So the black box was the first piece of information that was critical. It was the game changer.”
In fact, it was an engineer working with Cooper on the Melton case who discovered that GM had altered the ignition switch in 2006 or 2007, although the switch still carried the same part number and GM did not disclose the change.
The company finally began to recall vehicles with the bad ignition switches in February, citing a defect in which the cars shut down because the driver’s knee nudged the keychain, moving the key to “accessory.” (In this position, certain electrical accessories, such as the radio, continue to operate.) Even a hard jolt such as a pothole could jar the key to the accessory position. The cars’ systems, including power steering and air bags, would cease to work.
The recall now covers 2.6 million vehicles, including the Cobalt, the Saturn Ion, the Pontiac Solstice, the Saturn Sky and Chevrolet HHR.
GM has acknowledged that it knew about the faulty ignition switches as early as 2004 — although it did not announce the full recall until 10 years later — and admits that the part needed to fix the switch costs 57 cents.
Brooke Melton’s death is not among the 13 fatalities acknowledged by GM as being related to the defect, a fact that drew stern questioning from a Georgia congressman Tuesday.
“Brooke Melton’s tragic death is not acknowledged as part of this recall because her death is the result of a side impact,” U.S. Rep. Phil Gingrey, R-Ga., said. “Is Brooke Melton included in GM’s death count?”
“To my knowledge, no,” Barra said. “It was a side impact.”
So far, GM has only recognized frontal impacts in which air bags failed to deploy as being connected to the faulty switches.
Barra, a GM careerist who became CEO less than three months ago, began her testimony Tuesday afternoon with an apology and a pledge to find out precisely how the scandal unfolded.
“Sitting here today, I cannot tell you why it took years for a safety defect to be announced in (the small car) program, but I can tell you that we will find out,” Barra said. She also pledged that “when we have answers, we will be fully transparent with you, with our regulators, and with our customers.”
On several of the toughest questions from subcommittee members, however, Barra didn’t answer directly, falling back on her promise that the company’s investigation would reveal the answers the the public is seeking. She would not agree, however, to a congressman’s request that she release the “full report” that will be prepared by GM’s investigators. Instead, Barra said repeatedly that she’s willing to release “appropriate” findings.
Ken Melton and his wife watched Tuesday’s proceedings on their computer. He acknowledged that Barra is in a tough spot, but he thought she was less than forthright.
“I was pleased with how in-depth the congressmen got and would not let Ms. Barra off the hook,” Melton said. “She tried to sideline everything to the investigation that she’s doing, and in many instances they would not let her sideline it and were trying to get a yes or no answer.”
The night of March 10, 2010, Melton and his wife raced to the emergency room to be with their daughter, but Brooke was dead when they arrived.
“I whispered in her ear that I loved her, that I would miss her forever,” Ken Melton said. “And then I said, ‘I will vindicate your death.’” He said his daughter was such a careful driver he immediately suspected a problem with the car.
He said he and his wife derived some satisfaction from their settlement with GM, but the loss of their daughter has been unendurable.
“We have been in a constant state of depression and grief since it happened,” he said. “When you have to constantly deal with lawsuits and repeat the story over and over again, that wound never closes.”
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