Family finds dad in remote part of the Angeles forest

By the sixth night, David La Vau was convinced he was going to die.

The 67-year-old father of six was trapped at the bottom of a cliff in the Angeles National Forest after his car plunged off the mountain. His car landed next to another vehicle with the decomposing remains of its driver inside.

Too weak to scream for help any longer, La Vau walked to his crushed car and wrote on the dusty trunk:

“I love my kids. Dead man was not my fault. Love, Dad.”

A day later, his children were roaming the canyon road in a desperate search for their missing dad. They heard a weak cry from below the steep cliff. It was their father. And he was alive.

“He cried and we cried when we saw him,” said his son, Sean. “We couldn’t believe it.”

On Friday, as La Vau recovered from a dislocated shoulder and a few broken bones at Henry Mayo Newhall Memorial Hospital, his family gathered in a private waiting room near the Intensive Care Unit and recounted what happened.

La Vau disappeared last Friday night. The retired cable company worker was known for taking weekend trips on his own — to the beach, wine country, shopping — so the family didn’t worry.

But when Wednesday came and no one had heard from him, they filed a missing person report with the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Officials told the family it could take up to several days to process the report, Sean said.

“We didn’t have time to wait,” he said. So with his sisters, girlfriend and other relatives, Sean turned his Lancaster home into a search-and-rescue headquarters.

They called La Vau’s bank to find a credit card trail, his cellphone company to check his last calls, his doctor to see if he had checked in and his gym, where he religiously swam and walked on the treadmill.

With help from police, the family on Thursday pinpointed the area near the mountains where his cellphone had last been used.

In three cars, Sean and half a dozen other relatives set off to search with a backpack full of water, bandages and a hammer. Only two roads led to La Vau’s home in Lake Hughes: San Francisquito Canyon and Lakes Hughes.

They headed to Lake Hughes.

Driving slowly along the mountain, they stopped at every turn to peek over the cliff.

By sundown, as daylight was disappearing, they came to a place where the two-lane road twisted sharply, with little warning.

Sean got out of the car and stood in front of the mountain — hoping.

He heard a sound.

“It was a little moan,” he said.

When he yelled out “Hello!” someone responded down below.

“Help.”

It was faint, but Sean said he knew who it was.

“I thought, ‘Oh my God,’” Sean said. “It’s him.”

He looked down and could see his father’s blue Toyota Corolla, crushed like a tin can.

Quickly, he and a friend started down the steep, rocky cliff, grabbing onto any shrub they could find.

When Sean finally reached the bottom, he saw his father flat on the dirt, his battered body huddled next to the mountain.

He looked thinner, his face was caked with dry blood and he struggled to speak. Having nothing else to keep warm, he had covered his body with old gym towels he found in his car.

A few feet away, there was a second car in a ravine: a silver Toyota. Inside, there was the body of a man that had begun to decompose.

Authorities said they believe that car had driven off the cliff a few days before La Vau.

On Friday morning, with the media gathered around the hospital, emergency room doctor Garrett Sutter announced that La Vau was in stable condition.

“It’s astonishing that he did as well as did,” Sutter said.

In a waiting room on the second floor, Sean, his sisters and his mother gathered, leaving every few minutes to visit La Vau, who was alert and talking to his family and the nurses about the accident.

He said he had gone to Oxnard for the day to walk around and have dinner. As usual, the foodie planned his outings around meals.

On his way back home, he came to a sharp curve in the road and was suddenly blinded by the high beams of an oncoming car. Not knowing the road, he drove off the mountainside.

“He said, ‘I didn’t think that fall was ever going to end,’” Sean said.

La Vau remembers sliding wildly, nose first, down the cliff, then flipping and slamming violently into the ground. He blacked out.

When he came to, the sun was breaking over the canyon.

From there began six days of intense survival.

During the day, when the heat rose and the sun bounced off the mountains, La Vau struggled to find shade under the trees. And at night, when the air seemed to turn to ice, he huddled by the trees, covered with the gym towels.

The second day, as his hunger began to overwhelm him, he hunted through his car — and the car of the deceased man — for food. Crackers, nuts, anything.

But he found nothing so he drank water from a creek.

So he began to eat leaves off shrubs and trees and the tiny ants that crawled over his arms and on the dirt.

One day, a bumble bee tried to sting him, Sean said his father told him. Angry and annoyed, La Vau killed it. Then, he ate it.

“He said it was so disgusting, he wanted to spit it out, but he had to eat.”

He told his family there were days when he was afraid he wouldn’t survive, when he thought of the dead man in the car nearby. He would envision the cars driving up above, hear them zooming so close, but yet, so far.

Still, something told him he would be found. He hoped it would be his family who tracked him down.

Tenderly, his children teased him Friday about his adventures, especially his meals. This is the man, they said, who would go out of his way to find the perfect sushi roll, the best lobster taco. And there he was, eating ants. They laughed.

As they did, daughter Lisa La Vau walked in with great news. Their father would soon be allowed to eat something other than hospital food.

“We have his order!” she yelled happily. “Scallops. Steak. And asparagus.”

esmeralda.bermudez@latimes.com