A Tragic End That Yields No Answers

David Croy Jr. was devastated.

So was David Hilger, but for a slightly different reason. Croy had just killed two people. Hilger had nearly been killed.

On a recent Friday morning, I was asked to interview the two young men and get them to talk about the event that had irrevocably changed both of their lives. I found Hilger on a San Clemente emergency room hospital bed and Croy at home in near shock.

It wasn’t difficult to get them to open up. Both seemed to need the release.

The morning had started typically for Croy, 30, of Mission Viejo. He picked up two fellow workers before 5 a.m. at the corner of La Paz Road and Marguerite Parkway and began their car-pool to work near San Diego.

But he never got there. Instead, he explained to me over the telephone, he experienced a morning that he will never forget.

As the threesome were cruising south about 60 m.p.h. on Interstate 5--with a tractor-trailer in front of them and a motorcyclist behind--Croy glanced sideways to the opposite lane of traffic. He noticed that the freeway immigration checkpoint at San Onofre was busier than usual, with a long line of cars waiting to pass through. The heavy traffic meant nothing to him.

And when he looked back, suddenly a group of pedestrians were right in front of his car.

“There was a line of them right at the end of my headlight beam, maybe a dozen, all holding hands,” Croy said, and the pain in his voice was palpable over the telephone wire. “I locked my brakes--there was nothing else I could do--and I hit them straight on. Oh God, I knew I had hit them. . . . They were dead, no question.”

Until that moment, Hilger, 22, a San Diego-based Navy petty officer from Minnesota, did not know Croy. He only knew he had left his girlfriend’s Dana Point apartment before dawn and jumped on his newly bought 1981 Honda motorcycle to get to the Navy base in time for work.

Near the immigration checkpoint, Hilger checked his speedometer and noticed he was doing 60 m.p.h. It did not bother him. He was in the flow of traffic.

But then, quickly, things began to get weird. He noticed shadows on the right shoulder of the road, and there were things strewn about the freeway: a duffel bag, a jacket, assorted stuff. Then the weirdest thing of all: a man standing on the freeway.

“I swerved to miss him and saw the brake lights of (Croy’s) car in front of me,” said Hilger from his San Clemente hospital bed. “It was too late--he was stopped. I hit the back of his car full on and started flying through the air.”

Hilger never lost consciousness. He remembers bouncing on the pavement once, feeling the pain, then bouncing again and sliding to a halt. Still conscious, he lay there on the cold freeway until Croy came running up to him.

Several hours later, both Croy and Hilger were full of questions.

Hilger was in the hospital emergency room. He sat up in his bed, ignored the pain of two crushed bones in his foot and several scrapes and bruises, held the hand of his girlfriend, Katherine Waychoff, and tried to make sense of it all.

Two people, both illegal immigrants from Latin America, had been killed that morning running across the same highway, bringing the total to a record 15 for the year. Running for what? Freedom? A job? A better life?

“If these people are going to be running around out there, why not give them a way to get across (the freeway)? Maybe just light the area better?” Hilger asked.

Fifteen miles up the freeway in Mission Viejo, Croy was also seeking answers.

“Something has to be done about the murder and the killings. I’m going through hell. I don’t want anyone to go through this.”

I was supposed to be asking the questions. I certainly didn’t have any answers.