Screenwriter Roger Avary (who shared the Oscar with Quentin Tarantino for Pulp Fiction and co-wrote Beowulf with Neil Gaiman) apologized Monday for the car wreck that killed a friend and badly injured Avary's wife.

"Roger wishes to publicly convey his heartfelt condolences to the family of the deceased," said a statement released by Avary's publicist Julie Polkes. "Words cannot express how sorry he is, and this tragic accident will always haunt him."

Arrested and booked on charges of gross vehicular manslaughter and felony drunken driving after the accident at 12:34 a.m. Sunday in Ojai, Avary, 42, was released on $50,000 bail and due to be arraigned on Friday.

The car was eastbound on on a straightaway near Avary's home at the point in collided with a telephone pole in front of a lumber company on East Ojai Avenue, but witnesses to the aftermath said the police had measured tire marks appearing to begin in the westbound lane a good distance away. The force of the impact sheared the pole off about three feet high, pinning Avary's guest Andreas Zini, 34, in the passenger seat and ejecting Avary's wife Gretchen, 40, from the car. Witnesses said she laid breathing and semi-unconscious near the double yellow stripe in the roadway, as Avary pleaded, "Don't die Gretchen Don't die!" Former Ventura County district attorney Michael Bradbury, among the first to happen upon the scene, says he repeatedly told the distraught Avary to stop moving his wife's head about. Police questioned the writer as his wife was transported to Ojai Valley Community Hospital, where her condition was stable. Zini, of Modena, Italy and reportedly visiting the Avarys with his wife, was extricated with the Jaws of Life some time later and reportedly died at a local hospital.
Ironically, the locally celebrated Bradbury, who described Avary's pleas to his wife to the Los Angeles Times, was noted for his stern stance against impaired driving, as detailed in this 2002 story in the Ventura County Star :

A similar outlook was taken with regard to drunken drivers in the early 1980s, when Ventura County began charging drunken drivers as such, an unusual practice in a state where first-timers were frequently convicted of something less, like reckless driving, or speeding.

Bradbury, who like Avary and his wife lives in the near vicinity of the accident, told the Times, Avary He wasn't speaking real clearly. I assumed at that point he had something to drink."

Judie Houle, whose horse corral lies just beyond the parking lot where the car halted, says the stretch has had its share of accidents, including one that in fact ended in her corral. She described seeing Avary speaking quietly with police when she left her house to help out by stopping traffic on the road. Ojai Lumber proprietor Richard McArthur says parts from Avary's white Mercedes were scattered around the scene the next day. There was glass from the crash on his building's roof.

Avary was born in Manitoba, Canada and raised in Arizona. Though the collaboration with Tarantino (the two legendarily worked together in a Manhattan Beach video store), would ultimately be sundered over such issues as the extent of Avary's real contributions to Tarantino' s work, Tarantino co-produced Avary's Killing Zoe. Avary also directed "The Rules of Attraction, from Bret Easton Ellis' novel, and was at work on another Ellis adaptation, from Glamorama. The Beowulf credit was a step up from a series of lesser assignments, and one recent project he was at work on was from a video game, entitled Driver.

Hollywood absorbed another shock Tuesday afternoon with the news that brad Renfro, who began his film career at 12 working with Susan Sarandon and Tommy lee Jones in The Client and in May 206 pleaded guilty to driving while intoxicated and attempted possession of heroin, had been found dead at the age of 25.

(Booking photo courtesy of Ventura County Sheriff's Department)