“If parents aren’t going to hold their children accountable, then I am going to hold parents accountable for hurting and 𝘬iᩚlling innocent people while riding illegal motor vehicles.”
It happened April 16, 2026 when Ed Ashman – a substitute teacher at El Toro High School – was walking home from work
Prosecutors say the teenager hit him while doing wheelies in the middle of the street, then left the scene. Ashman was taken to a hospital in critical condition and died two weeks later.
In June 2025 when her son was 13, Mejer called the Orange County Sheriff’s Department to complain that someone was posting pictures of her son riding an e-motorcycle.
On body cam, during a 28-minute talk with two deputies, she admitted she bought him the Surron and knew he rode it recklessly.
Deputies told her she could face criminal charges if she kept letting him ride a vehicle he could not legally ride.
However, hours after the April 16 𝔠r𝘢sh, Mejer was caught on body cam telling police, repeatedly, that neither she nor her son owned a Surron or had access to one.
But police found the 2025 Surron Ultra Bee and arrested the teenager.
Spitzer, the Republican district attorney, did not treat this as a tragic accident with no adult attached to it.
“An American hero who survived flying combat missions in Vietnam could not survive walking across the street in Lake Forest because of a 14-year-old child who was allowed to ride an E-Motorcycle that he should have never been riding,”
“This mother essentially handed her 14-year-old son a deadly weapon, and despite multiple warnings of the dangers, continued to let him illegally ride an E-Motorcycle until he finally killed someone.”
Since January 2026, Spitzer’s office has charged at least three parents for letting children ride illegal e-motorcycles.
One is a Yorba Linda father whose 12-year-old was critically hurt after running a red light on a machine modified to reach about 60 mph.
The father and son had also been warned.
In mid-May, Spitzer created a unit called RIDE SAFELY to review e-bike and e-motorcycle cases against juveniles and the adults who put them on the machines.
By late July, prosecutors said they had 26 open investigations that could produce charges against parents.
Spitzer has called these vehicles the top reason Orange County children end up in the emergency room, and he has said prosecution of parents who keep handing them over is a promise, not a threat.
Mejer, 50, was already facing felony child endangerment and accessory-after-the-fact counts when Ashman died.
The amended complaint adds involuntary manslaughter:
- One felony count of involuntary manslaughter in Ashman’s dєatᩚh
- One felony count of child endangerment
- One felony count of accessory after the fact
- One misdemeanor count of contributing to the delinquency of a minor
- One misdemeanor count of giving false information to a peace officer
- One infraction for letting an unlicensed minor under 18 drive a motor vehicle
If convicted on all counts, she faces up to seven years and eight months in state prison.
