A small silver lining

By Abigail Goldman

Tuesday, Feb. 28, 2006 | 7:31 a.m.

Tim Booton had to land on his neck to learn about the tumor growing inside it.

And he has a carload of criminals to thank for both the injury and the fortuitous discovery.

The 59-year-old Las Vegan was riding a bike on Tenaya Way one year ago when a car pulled alongside him with windows rolled down. Passengers he didn't recognize pelted him with garbage.

The driver, who has not been found, steered his sedan into Booton's path, once to scare and twice to try to hurt him. Booton was angling his bike out of the way when his front wheel was caught in a crack, pitching him over the handlebars to land on a low wall, neck first.

An emergency room doctor gave the dual diagnosis: a bruised esophagus and a tumor growing inside his throat, jarred by the fall.

Four days later, the uninsured handyman was facing more than $60,000 in hospital bills.

The Nevada Victims of Crime Program, however, reviewed Booton's case and awarded him $25,635.

Victims of Crime gives money that helps cover the cost of medical expenses, counseling, funerals and lost wages to people victimized by crime, state coordinator Bryan Nix said.

Last year the program divided more than $6 million among nearly 1,800 crime victims - one of whom was Booton, whose surgery was eligible for partial compensation because doctors discovered the tumor after the vehicular assault.

"In one way, it (the accident) was a blessing," Booton said. "A strange blessing."

The program awards more money every year, and every year the crimes get a little uglier, Las Vegas compensation officer Patricia Moore said.

"It's become much more violent," she said. "People have just become more brutal."

For victims to be eligible, the crime must have occurred in Nevada, though the applicant need not be a resident. The victim or his family must have filed a police report within a reasonable amount of time and demonstrate that he is not culpable for the crime. The program, Nix explained, is not in the business of helping the "loser in a barroom brawl."

Compensation officers determine who should be awarded and how much - a calculation based on income, insurance and need.

Moore has arranged compensation for the children of parents who have been burned to death; young men beaten senseless in parking lots; women tied to beds and abused; a man kicked in the head with steel toe boots until he went deaf; and a man who lost an eye and will never work again.

"I won't say that we're hardened," she said. "We see a lot of things that don't surprise us. We see a few things that do."

Moore regularly reviews hospital bills that run into hundreds of thousands of dollars, but there are limits to compensation available under the program. No victim can receive more than $35,000, nor can the program provide more than $300 per week to cover lost wages, $3,500 for funeral expenses or $5,500 for counseling.

For victims who survive, hospital bills are often only the beginning of their problems, Moore said.

"This is not just the incident itself, this is a domino effect for these people," she said. "They're injured and they miss work, then they lose their job, then they lose their apartment, then they're on the streets. It's a merry-go-round."

Hal Sweeney, 50, was hit by a car in his neighborhood last September and has not been able to work since.

Sweeney stepped outside his Tonopah Drive home around 3 a.m. to investigate a speeding car and got only two solid looks at the driver - once when he skidded close enough for Sweeney to hit his car with a cane and again when the driver drove head-on toward Sweeney.

"The guy tried to kill me twice," Sweeney said. "The damage is permanent."

Doctors were forced to temporarily remove his larynx to work on his snapped neck.

The former machine operator now has 13 metal rods in his neck, which is additionally bolstered by bone harvested from his hip.

Sweeney, who has about $450,000 in hospital bills, has received $16,860 from the victims' program.

Part of the money is going toward therapy to deal with memory problems Sweeney has had since the incident.

"A lot of it is confusion and fear," he said. "It's just that I've got no idea what I'm going to do. I'll never get on another piece of equipment again."

Doctors have told Sweeney not to lift anything weighing more than 10 pounds. He could be eligible for additional funding as more operations are needed, Moore said.

Victims seeking compensation for assault and domestic violence accounted for more than half of last year's victims - a pattern that has repeated itself since Nevada's program was started in 1981, Moore said.

The program handled 26 cases its first year, then saw its caseload grow 50-fold over the next decade. By 2000, the number of annual applications approached 2,200, and the demand has grown ever since, rising to 2,549 last year, Moore said.

As more people seek money for increasingly expensive medical treatments, compensation programs across the country could find themselves short of funds, said Dan Eddy, executive director of the National Association of Crime Victim Compensation Boards.

"The demand is rising, and if a state (program) is able to carry over funds from the last year, they'll probably be spending it soon," Eddy said.

Most victims' programs, including Nevada's, are funded from a combination of locally generated sources and federal money, Eddy said.

The funding is often erratic and frequently leaves the program backlogged by as much as $1 million, Nix said.

"The claims come in, the bills come in, the money trickles in from its various sources," Nix said. "It's always kind of a catch-up situation.

"It's pretty much a constant battle for funding. Everyone is clamoring."

Paradoxically, state funding is dependent on crime. Nevada's victims' program receives $20 for every DUI license reinstatement, $20 for every bail bond, all bond forfeitures, court fees that exceed $11 and a percentage of income generated by prison industry - revenue that last year amounted to more than $5 million.

The program also received about $1.6 million in federal funds in 2005.

When demand for assistance exceeds available funds, the program sometimes must wait months to catch up with victims' hospital bills.

And the threat of hospital bills is sometimes enough to frighten victims out of ambulances, Metro Police victims' advocate Peggy Wellman said.

Wellman and colleagues host classes that teach Metro officers how to best refer people they encounter on the beat to the victims' program.

"Sometimes that referral means more to the victim than any other," Wellman said.

When funding is tight, the victims' program is forced to prioritize needs, covering immediate demands before helping with lingering hospital bills, Nix said. The program is still paying off hospital bills incurred last September.

Nix is considering petitioning the Legislature to increase court payments and fees that the program imposes on criminals.

If the money gets too tight, the program will simply have to offer less money to more people, Nix said.

"We're a payer of last resort," he said. "We would survive it."