‘We’re never going to stop looking for the guy that killed him.’ : Something About the Man

There was something about the man, something vital, something sad, something inspiring, something . . . alive.

It was the way he faced life laughing, the way he joined the guys for softball, the way he hauled out of bed at 3 in the morning to help someone in trouble, the way he fought back from alcoholism.

Bart West epitomized in so many ways that which is flawed and decent and good and vulnerable about all of us, something that glorifies the species, something that glows in the storm.

Which is why it hurt so much when he died.

It happened about a month ago. West, 26, one of five brothers, a machinist by trade, was on his way home to Palmdale after spending the evening with his mother.

He stopped for coffee and doughnuts off Sepulveda near Nordhoff. It was shortly after 1 o’clock in the morning when he began the last lap home.

Witnesses said he had just pulled his shiny new motorcycle, a Kawasaki 900, onto Sepulveda when a battered brown station wagon came along, traveling in the same direction.

“It was swerving all over the road,” a friend, Jim Flickinger, said. “Then it drifted over to Bart’s lane and hit him from behind. It threw Bart from his motorcycle.”

The bike went skidding off in a shower of sparks, like fireworks to a fading spirit.

“At first, the car slowed. It looked as though the driver might stop. But then he speeded up again, caught Bart under the car and dragged him for 250 feet. His body rolled out from under the back of the car, and the guy was gone.”

Bart West died instantly, and the man who killed him is still at large. That isn’t a new occurrence in the San Fernando Valley. Nineteen people were killed by hit-run drivers last year.

But those who knew West weren’t about to allow him to fade off into statistical infinity without redemption. There was atonement called for here. There was recognition of a terrible wrong.

And there was that glowing something that had characterized the man, that energy of life, the best in us.

So they set out on a mission.

About 25 of Bart’s friends and relatives have begun an effort to bring his killer to justice.

They search for the man in whatever spare time they can wrench from their working days and often from their nights.

Hundreds of flyers have been distributed, especially in the area of Sepulveda and Nordhoff. Salesmen carry them. Deliverymen pass them out. Store owners put them in windows.

The circular depicts the killer-car: a 1976 beige Chevrolet Malibu Classic station wagon with damage to the left front grille. They believe its driver was a white male, about 25, with long, stringy blond hair.

“We think he’s in the area,” Flickinger, an LAPD chopper pilot, said. “Someone saw the car as recently as a week ago. It was swerving so bad they couldn’t get the license number.”

The irony isn’t lost on any of them. If the driver who killed West is a drunk, he probably could have gotten help from the man whose mangled body he dragged beneath his car.

West was a recovering alcoholic, dry for five years, a leader in his AA group, a man who would have gone to the ends of the Earth to help someone who needed it and asked for it.

Perhaps that was the quality that defined him, that made him unique. A man who, having suffered pain, could empathize with those who hurt. “He never failed anyone,” Flickinger said. “If you asked him to be there, he was.”

A picture emerges. “He was just a beautiful man,” an uncle, Doug Martin, said, groping for words. “What was it, a happiness ? I don’t know.

“I watched a videotape of him the other day. The tape was shot at a birthday party. Bart seemed to be everywhere, talking, moving, making somebody feel good. He was always laughing.”

The sentence trailed off, then: “You know, we’re never going to stop looking for the guy that killed him.”

West touched many lives. Policemen. Businessmen. Executives. They met through Alcoholics Anonymous or through softball games weeknights at Balboa Park.

Whatever the quality that distinguished Bart in life remains a part of their collective memory now. The bright, glowing goodness of the man.

I heard of him from Doug Martin, whose job it was to contact newspapers in the search for his nephew’s killer.

“Bart was a big, lovely, likable kid,” he said to me. “Help us.”

I feel it too. There was something about the man . . . something real, something gentle, something so terribly fragile.

How sad that he was with us such a little while.