Vanishing Cross : Caltrans Removes Victim’s Memorial

All James Downing’s friends wanted was to erect a small memorial near the spot where he was killed when his truck was rammed by a drunk driver last year. So early Wednesday they drove to the South Street overpass on the Orange Freeway and set a 3-foot white cross in concrete.

Less than nine hours later it was gone. An application for its construction had been denied by a Caltrans supervisor, and it was ordered removed, said Sgt. Bill Elliott of the California Highway Patrol.

“By California law, private individuals are not allowed to erect signs by the side of the freeway,” said Caltrans spokesman Thomas Knox.

Cross Ripped Out

For Downing’s friends, who watched a Caltrans worker rip the cross out of the ground and drive away, the setback was just the latest in four months of attempts to get permission from Caltrans officials to erect the memorial.

Downing, who lived in Yorba Linda and was 25 when he died, was driving his truck on the Orange Freeway in Anaheim last March 31 when he was hit by a drunk driver traveling 90 m.p.h. Downing was killed and his passenger, David Vaillette, 30, was left paralyzed from the chest down.

The idea for the cross came from Mary Anna Downing, James’ mother, who lost another son to a drunk driver. “I want people to wake up to the fact that this (drinking and driving) does happen,” she said. “People die from it.”

Mary Downing, an Arlington, Tex., resident, said she had no problem placing a cross by the roadside in Texas where her 18-year-old son died in 1983. She had an identical cross made for James and left it with Cindy Roy, to whom James was engaged when he was killed.

Roy, 22, and her friend Dan Calef, 27, have been trying since April to convince Caltrans officials to allow the memorial but have been rebuffed consistently.

“I want to know why they won’t allow it,” Calef said, adding that he hopes to begin a program to memorialize all drunk-driving victims in California. “If you drive down the road and see three or four crosses, it’s going to shake you up a bit.”

Finally, the search for permission gave way to action, and shortly after midnight the cross was erected. “As time goes on, it gets frustrating, so the cross went up,” Roy said.

Just as quickly, it came down. Calef and Roy organized a press conference at the site at 8 a.m. Elliott was on the scene within minutes and announced that either the participants at the ceremony or Caltrans would have to remove the cross.

Roy, Calef and Vaillette elected to leave the cross where it was and force Caltrans to remove it. An hour later, a Caltrans employee lifted the cross out of its setting, put it in the back of his pickup truck and drove away.

Caltrans’ Memorials

Ironically, Caltrans erected memorials three years ago for two of its workers killed on the job. Two street signs, each depicting a hard hat and reading “In Memoriam,” were placed on Laguna Canyon Road and the San Diego Freeway in July, 1982.

Laguna Canyon Road is also the site where groups of residents have alternately erected and torn down white crosses memorializing fatalities--but not specifically drunk-driver related ones--over the past several years.

Knox described the Caltrans effort three years ago as a “safety awareness program” made necessary by an alarming number of highway fatalities among Caltrans workers. “We wanted to drive that point home,” he said.

Although the idea was “definitely effective,” the signs were removed a year later. “It was effective, yes. But even Caltrans can’t have an ongoing program to memorialize its own employees,” Knox said.

Caltrans cannot change its policy, he said, without action by the California Legislature. Were such a law allowing memorials to drunk-driving victims passed, Caltrans would follow it wholeheartedly, he said. “Anything that could bring more into mind that situation . . . would be positive.”

Despite Caltrans’ action Wednesday, Downing’s friends and relatives aren’t giving up hope. Calef said he is preparing to write a second round of letters to local and state representatives, including the governor, on the issue. Mary Anna Downing, 60, said she is ready to get another cross and try again.

“I will not stop,” she said. “I only have two children left . . . and I don’t want anything to happen to them.”