Woman Posts Reward for Husband’s Hit-and-Run Killer

It’s been more than a month since the accident, but Pauline Seftel still has not opened the closet containing her husband’s clothes or the drawer with his after-shave, comb and toothbrush.

She closed the closet door and swept the toiletries into the drawer after a hit-and-run driver struck and killed her husband, Martin, 56, as he stood near his disabled car on the Simi Valley Freeway in Mission Hills on March 12.

“I’m going to have to go through his things but I can’t do it yet,” said Seftel, 53, as she sat in the small wood-paneled family room of the Granada Hills home where she and her husband had lived for 27 years.

Making it even more difficult to come to terms with her husband’s death is the fact that the California Highway Patrol has been unable to catch the unidentified man who witnesses said ran over her husband, stopped to look, then drove off.

So Seftel has offered a $5,000 reward for information leading to the man’s arrest and conviction. Anyone with information about the incident can contact the West Valley area CHP office in Woodland Hills.

“I would just like to ask him how he could walk away without even seeing if my husband was alive. Seeing him there, how could he do that?” the dark-haired grandmother said. “It makes the loss twice as bad because this man is still free. Why should he be walking around?”

Martin Seftel, a certified public account, father of two and grandfather, was driving west on the Simi Valley Freeway at 11:10 p.m. when a car driven by a 35-year-old Sepulveda woman swerved into his lane to avoid a slow-moving car.

Both vehicles spun out of control and came to rest blocking several lanes of the freeway. Unable to start his car, Seftel waited by the center divider for help. A silver or white 1984 Nissan 200-SX traveling 55 to 60 m.p.h. swerved to avoid Seftel’s car and struck Seftel.

He was thrown about 45 feet and died almost immediately of chest and abdominal injuries, CHP Officer Eugene Jones said.

Under hypnosis, a witness told authorities that a tanned male Caucasian, age 30 to 35, with neatly cut dark, straight hair, stopped, surveyed the damage, then drove off. The woman driver involved in the accident briefly chased the fleeing car, but lost sight of it.

At home, Pauline Seftel woke up at 1:45 a.m. and knew that something was wrong. Her husband should have been home hours earlier from a meeting in Whittier. He invariably called to let his wife know when he was going to be late.

About two hours later, after frantic calls to authorities, two Los Angeles police officers came to tell her of her husband’s death.

Now, Seftel rifles through the more than 200 sympathy cards in a basket on the coffee table and reads the words from her husband’s friends and associates.

He helped found the Granada Hills Community Theater and was active in B’nai B’rith and the Society for the Preservation of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America Inc. He donated his accounting skills, his time for their meetings and his muscle when heavy shelves and rafters needed to be moved, Seftel said.

Three hundred people went to his funeral.

“Everybody liked him. He had no enemies in the world,” Pauline Seftel said.

Finances are not a major problem for Seftel, who works as a part-time secretary for several accountants.

What is hard is the loneliness. The frenzy caused by income tax season has been a helpful diversion, and friends keep her busy, sometimes extending two to three invitations for one night, she said.

“I force myself to do things. My heart isn’t in it but I go through the motions,” Seftel said.

Officer Jones is optimistic that the hit-and-run driver can be found. The state Department of Motor Vehicles recently gave the CHP a list of 5,300 Nissan 200-SX owners registered in Los Angeles and Ventura counties.

Investigators narrowed their search to 400 cars in the geographical area in which the accident occurred, and Nissan has agreed to tell the CHP which of those cars are silver or white, narrowing the field to about 150 cars, Jones said.

It wasn’t easy to come up with the $5,000 reward money, Seftel said, but: “I’m willing to do without a lot of things to get this guy caught. I’ll do without clothes, I’ll do without a vacation. I’ll do without extras.

“It will be a sacrifice. But I’ll just work harder because I feel this person should be caught.”