Van Driver Charged in Crash That Killed Father and Daughter

A Montebello man whose van plowed into the front yard of a San Fernando home, killing a 2-year-old girl and her father, was charged Tuesday with vehicular manslaughter and drunk driving.

The Sunday accident, which began with a crash into a parked car, galvanized dozens of neighbors who poured out of their homes to see what had happened, witnesses said. About 25 residents, in a futile attempt to rescue their neighbor, Jose Hernandez, overturned the heavy van that had pinned him against his house, witnesses said. Others wrestled with the driver, Fabian Perez, and held him until police arrived.

A distraught Perez told his captors in Spanish, “Better to kill me, better to kill me,” said Ignacio Berrera, one of three men who detained him after the accident.

Perez, a 25-year-old shoe salesman, was charged Tuesday in San Fernando Municipal Court with two counts of vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated and two of felony drunk driving, causing injury. If convicted, he faces up to 13 years in state prison, including a year for injuring more than one victim, Deputy Dist. Atty. Lori Dery said.

Perez was held in lieu of $40,000 bail. San Fernando police described him as extremely remorseful and said he has no criminal record.

Meanwhile, relatives of Hernandez, a 41-year-old truck driver, made funeral arrangements for him and his daughter, who died of her injuries Monday at AMI Tarzana Regional Medical Center as about 50 members of her extended family maintained a prayer vigil.

The family donated the girl’s organs for use in medical transplants “to keep their child alive and to help someone else,” a hospital spokeswoman said.

The accident occurred about 7:45 p.m. Sunday as Hernandez used a leaf blower to clean a walkway in his garden, with his wife, Gloria, sweeping in his wake, she recalled Tuesday. Their youngest child, also named Gloria, was running back and forth between her father and Berrera, a tenant and friend of the family, Gloria Hernandez said.

Perez had been drinking beer at a friend’s house after selling shoes at the San Fernando Swap Meet, San Fernando Police Detective Robert Ordelheide said.

As he drove south in the 700 block of Glenoaks Boulevard, Perez rear-ended Berrera’s car, parked on the street, and caromed into the Hernandezes’ yard, Ordelheide said.

Berrera and other witnesses said Perez’s Dodge van plowed through a chicken-wire fence and a tomato patch, struck young Gloria and then her father, dragging him to the house and pinning him against it.

Hernandez’s oldest child, 17-year-old Sandra, said she was in the house when the building shook from the van’s impact. “It felt like an earthquake,” she said.

Her mother said she heard the van strike Berrera’s car and before she knew it, it had hit the house. Then she saw her husband, realized he was dead, and carried her fatally injured daughter into the house, she said.

The accident remains under investigation by the California Highway Patrol. San Fernando Police Detective Daniel Mena said Perez’s speed was estimated at 40 to 60 m.p.h.