A 29-year-old Stanton man pleaded guilty Tuesday and was immediately sentenced to three years in prison for a deadly hit-and-run collision in Garden Grove three years ago when he was not allowed to drive.
George Nabil Wahba pleaded guilty to a felony count of hit-and-run with permanent injury.
The crash occurred about noon Aug. 11, 2022, in the 9500 block of Lampson Avenue, between Magnolia and Brookhurst streets. The victim was identified only as Conrad R. in a criminal complaint.
In a motion to deny Wahba bail, Deputy District Attorney Devin Campbell said the defendant lost his driving privileges in 2015, but kept driving and getting into crashes over the years.
Wahba “continued to have that (driving) privilege suspended again and again and again, having five repeated overlapping suspensions in the intervening years for various, not the least of which were failures to appear in court, insurance cancellations, and needing medical evaluations, yet still continues to drive,” Campbell said.
Wahba “has been the driver in at least seven collisions since the DMV first told him to stop driving,” Campbell alleged.
“Thus far, the defendant has injured at least four different people while driving illegally, including the victim in the present case, whom he killed and left dead in the street while he got on his phone and started making calls to get his car fixed,” Campbell said.
“When he was caught red-handed at the auto body shop trying to get his car repaired, he told police he didn’t want to stop after colliding into the victim, because then he would be contacted by the police, and he knew he had a warrant out for his arrest.”
For Wahba, it was more important to avoid a misdemeanor warrant “than to stop his car alongside the road after causing another human being to flip through the air like a circus acrobat, and instead drove his car with human hair and flesh stuck in the windshield to a repair shop to erase any sign of what he had done,” Campbell said.
On Aug. 11, 2022, the defendant was driving a Subaru Impreza that side-swiped a parked car on Lampson Avenue “while its owner was standing on the driver’s side waxing the car, in front of his own house, and was thrown into the air and propelled down the street,” Campbell said.
Wahba “did not even bother to slow down or brake as he drove past the victim’s body in the roadway,” Campbell said.
The defendant then “got on his phone and started searching for auto body repair shops, started calling and texting with technicians, and proceeded to take his car to a repair shop with hair and bodily tissue still stuck in the windshield. Defendant’s blood taken hours after the collision showed the presence of THC,” Campbell said.