He Gives the Performance of His Life at Accident Scene

Ray Abboud is a one-man army when he takes to the streets of Los Angeles.

That’s what he was Wednesday night when he saw a head-on automobile collision near the downtown Civic Center.

Abboud, 31, said he maneuvered his own car into position to shield the accident victims from being hit by other motorists traveling in the 600 block of 1st Street.

Then he dispatched members of a growing crowd of onlookers to call authorities.

Then he aided two badly injured women trapped in the front seat of one of the wrecked cars.

Then he discovered that a 9-year-old girl on the floor of the back seat was not breathing and performed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation until he revived her.

Then he noticed the motorist that hit the women was sneaking off. Abboud chased down and captured the suspected drunk driver and dragged him back to the scene.

Then he helped clear a path through stalled traffic along 1st Street so that professional rescuers could reach the scene.

“I just got mad,” said Abboud, owner of an East Los Angeles clothing store and a part-time singer. “Everybody was just standing there doing nothing. I kept thinking it could be my own little girl lying there.”

Los Angeles police confirmed Abboud’s account of the incident. They said Thursday that the driver that Abboud chased half a block and subdued was arrested on suspicion of felony drunk driving and felony hit-and-run and booked at the Parker Center Jail. They identified the suspect as Enrique Llamas, 47, of Los Angeles. The hit-and-run allegation is based largely on Abboud’s eyewitness account, police said.

Police confirmed that Abboud applied cardiopulmonary resuscitation to 9-year-old Melinda Araujo of Los Angeles until she began breathing. Paramedics took the girl to County-USC Medical Center, where she was listed in critical condition Thursday.

The driver of the car, Stephanie Araujo, 19, of El Monte, was in serious but stable condition with head injuries at County-USC. Passenger Socorro Araujo, 42, of Los Angeles was treated and released. The relationship between the victims was not immediately clear.

“The little girl looked almost dead when I first saw her,” Abboud said. “I thought, ‘I’ve got to save her.’ I pushed on her chest and breathed into her mouth like I saw done on a TV show about earthquake preparedness.”

During the 15 minutes that Abboud estimates he worked over the child, “nobody else came to help. There must have been 70 people standing around.”

When the girl coughed and started breathing on her own he looked up in time to see the suspect allegedly slinking away. Abboud recognized Llamas as the man who had earlier climbed out of the wreckage of one of the cars.

“I grabbed him and dragged him back down the street. I told him to sit and not move or I’d make it worse for him.”

When he heard the sound of ambulance sirens in the distance, Abboud said, he ran into the street and “pounded on the hoods of cars” to make motorists move aside so rescuers could reach the scene.

Abboud said he was trying to avoid heavy traffic on the Hollywood Freeway about 6:15 p.m. Wednesday when he turned onto 1st Street. He said he was headed to Hollywood to pick up equipment for a charity singing engagement Saturday.

“I’m going to write a song and dedicate it to that little girl,” he said. “It’s going to be a song about drunk drivers.”

Times staff writer Nieson Himmel contributed to this story.