Who’s to Blame? : Francisco Del Rey, 15, is charged with manslaughter in a Miami car crash that left three young men dead and another paralyzed. Rarely has a wreck been more steeped in senseless, youthful tragedy, spawned more news coverage or provoked more public debate.

Free-lance news photographer Marc Siegal makes a living by video-taping what he calls “grisly scenes with twisted metal and bodies spilling out of cars like hamburger.” He’s seen a lot.

Still, when he arrived shortly after 3 a.m. on Dec. 30 at the intersection of 17th and South Dixie Highway, Siegal says he did not fully appreciate the horror before him.

Smoke drifted up from the crumpled shell of a black Corvette; inside, two people didn’t move. A third lay on the pavement nearby.

Some yards away, at the end of a trail of twisted debris, sat two charred clumps of metal about armchair size. In one, he could make out two mangled bodies. Amid car parts on the street he could make out the disfigured remains of yet another.

At first, says Siegal, 34, “I couldn’t tell what had happened. Then I realized that these two pieces were the front and back of one car, a Chevette. I assumed that the fire department had cut the car in half to get the bodies out.”

No. The Chevette had been cut in half by the Corvette, which witnesses said had been drag-racing a high-performance Mustang at speeds estimated at more than 100 miles an hour. Three young men in the Chevette were killed instantly when their car turned left into the Corvette’s path.

Air bags saved the Corvette’s driver and a front-seat passenger from serious injury. A third person, riding in the luggage compartment, was thrown from the sports car and left a quadriplegic.

At the hospital later that morning, the father of the Corvette’s driver told reporters: “He was not to blame. The car turned in front of him. It wasn’t my son’s fault.”

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There have been car crashes in Miami involving more carnage, more vehicles, even more speed. But rarely has a wreck been more steeped in senseless, youthful tragedy, spawned more news coverage and provoked more public debate.

At the focus of the public anguish is baby-faced high school freshman Francisco Del Rey, who apparently was given everything in his young life except a set of rules.

After a night of club-hopping on trendy South Beach with two friends, Francisco, 15, was at the wheel of the black 1994 Corvette leased for him by his father. Moreover, according to a report in the Miami Herald, Frank Del Rey helped his underage son falsify his birth date to illegally obtain a driver’s license. Police are investigating.

Francisco is charged with three counts of manslaughter and one of using a phony driver’s license. Additional charges of homicide by driving under the influence of alcohol and marijuana, and manslaughter with a deadly weapon--the Corvette--have been dismissed.

But Francisco will be tried as an adult, a judge ruled last week, and if convicted on all counts, he could face up to 50 years in jail.

Until he was released Friday, Francisco had spent three weeks in juvenile detention, where his attorney, Simon T. Steckel, says he had grown depressed and suffered the taunts of others in the lock-up, who would go “vroom, vroom” when they saw him. “He is being vilified by the public,” Steckel says. “Everybody is looking to point a finger.”

Prosecutor David I. Gilbert, however, said in court that Francisco’s “willful conduct” in speeding makes him to blame for “five people’s lives unalterably changed.”

Yet, dozens of letters to newspapers and hours of talk on radio and in private indicate that many in Miami think that it is Francisco’s parents who should stand trial.

“If you set out to create an offender, you would probably do the kinds of things this family apparently did,” says sociologist Paul Cromwell, who has used the Del Rey case as a topic of lively discussion in his criminology classes at the University of Miami. “He was not given any assistance in growing up.”

And while insisting that Francisco must be held responsible for his actions, even Juvenile Judge Steve Levine seemed to echo that view last week during a hearing.

“What is a 15-year-old doing at 3 o’clock in the morning driving a powerful ‘Vette, presumably given to him by his parents with a driver’s license they helped him obtain?” the judge wondered aloud during a hearing last Thursday.

“This constitutes almost criminal neglect by the parents.”

Levine released Francisco to the custody of his uncle, Julio, Frank Del Rey’s brother, while warning that he did not want the parents exercising any authority over their son until the criminal case has been settled. Then, in an aside to Francisco, Levine said: “I know they love you, but I question their judgment as I question yours.”

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Florida has serious problems with juvenile crime. One of the kids charged in the highly publicized slaying of a British tourist near Tallahassee last September is just 13. The three Miamians accused of murdering a German visitor days earlier are all teen-agers. Just last month, a 16-year-old girl in West Palm Beach shot a cab driver in the head after she and two friends got a ride home from the mall, police say. The apparent motive: She didn’t want to pay the $6 fare.

In most of the sensational killings that have made international headlines and dismayed Florida’s tourism officials, the accused have come from economically deprived backgrounds, from families often headed by single parents. The crimes have touched off furious debate here about strengthening the family unit, as well as how to handle juveniles charged with heinous crimes.

When the Florida Legislature reconvened earlier this month, crime, the family and the construction of more prisons for young offenders were high on the agenda.

Francisco Del Rey’s family is intact. He lived with his father, mother and older siblings in a house valued at $1.5 million. He attended a private school, where he wore a beeper and carried his own cellular phone. He totaled his first Corvette--a yellow $40,000 1993 model--last summer when he was in eighth grade. His father replaced it with the 1994 model.

Nonetheless, many think Francisco was deprived, too.

“This is a situation where the Del Rey family comes into the community, with a lot of dollars to throw around, leading an arrogant lifestyle,” says Stewart G. Greenberg, an attorney who has filed a $20-million civil suit against the Del Reys on behalf of Carlos Brito, 16, the passenger thrown from the Corvette and now paralyzed.

Says Siegal, the photographer: “I’m just furious at the parents. What was his option? To renounce his parents, his lifestyle, his phony driver’s license? Give me a break. He’s a victim, too.”

Comments from Del Rey’s relatives and friends seem only to have inflamed public opinion. His girlfriend’s mother was quoted as saying that the three men who died in the Chevette were being portrayed as “bigger than life just because they’re poor and Eagle Scouts.” She said the Del Reys were getting “a bad rap . . . just because they have money and can afford giving him a Corvette.”

After Del Rey was formally charged and led off to the juvenile lockup last month, his stepsister wailed: “He’s just a baby! He’s not to blame.”

At that point, the Miami Herald weighed in with an editorial: “The Del Reys just don’t get it, and their young son and brother, Francisco, has become the lightning rod through which a community’s disgust and ire sear the entire family.”

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Francisco’s parents, Frank and Gloria, moved to Miami in the late 1970s from Puerto Rico, where she was a beauty queen and he had a long history of troubled business dealings.

According to the Miami Herald, Frank Del Rey, 48, and his brother, Julio, were embroiled in a mid-1970s scandal involving missing building permits for a motel they operated. Payoffs were alleged, and when a bomb turned up under the car of a rival motel owner, it blew off the hands of two bomb-squad members who tried to defuse it. The Del Reys were suspects, according to reports, but no one was charged.

In Miami, Frank Del Rey bought a onetime resort near the Everglades, and local Drug Enforcement Administration officers were on the scene in 1979, investigating reports it had become a landing zone for drug smugglers, according to the Miami Herald. And, in 1985, he was detained in Colombia for violating its air space.

Police, meanwhile, were frequently called to the Del Reys’ sprawling six-bedroom house, protected by Rottweilers and a super-sensitive alarm system. Some calls were in response to burglaries; one time a housesitter attempted suicide.

By the late 1980s, Frank Del Rey reportedly was running a lucrative business shipping luxury cars to Puerto Rico. But in 1991, a federal grand jury in Puerto Rico said the cars were hot, and Del Rey was indicted on charges of unlawful interstate commerce. A plea bargain resulted in a year’s probation and $1,000 fine.

According to the Herald, the Del Reys also had tax problems; the couple failed to file income tax returns from 1982 to 1985, a court said.

And in 1989, the Herald reported, Del Rey’s stepdaughter accused him of trying to rape her in her San Juan apartment. The charges were later withdrawn at her mother’s request.

Attorney Steckel calls most of the allegations “media fodder” unrelated to Francisco’s case, but he refuses comment on family history or Frank Del Rey’s occupation.

Recently, other Miami Herald revelations have further complicated the Del Reys’ image problems. Frank Del Ray is said to have pressured a priest in Puerto Rico to alter a birth date on a baptismal record so Francisco could get a driver’s license. And Francisco’s mother and stepsister reportedly were arrested in 1986 for grand theft after being stopped in a stolen car. The file in the latter case has been sealed by the court.

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Francisco Del Rey has a steel rod in his leg from his first serious accident, when he smashed up a motorcycle at 13 while living in Venezuela. In Miami, he had racked up at least four traffic violations. The family has no health insurance, and the county’s public hospital says it may be out about $16,000 for treating Francisco after the two Corvette crashes.

The firestorm of publicity has wiped out any chance he had to get a fair trial here, Steckel charges: “This case has become larger than life, and 99% of what’s been reported . . . has nothing to do with the case. Every family must have things in the closet; it’s still totally irrelevant.”

Although Francisco had been drinking and has been charged with manslaughter, he was not legally drunk, according to blood tests. But the driver of the Chevette was.

Luis Jerez, 21, a shoe salesman, had a blood-alcohol level of .14%, above the 1993 limit of .10, when he pulled out to make a left turn, according to reports. He and his passengers, Eagle Scout Alvaro Cadenas, 19, and Carlos Rios, 18, roommates at the University of Florida, had been partying in the Coconut Grove section of Miami before the crash.

Steckel claims that the speed of the Corvette is not a factor: “The undisputed fact is that the Chevette failed to yield the right of way. I don’t know how you get around that. The speed issue is irrelevant.”

Assistant State Atty. Gilbert will counter that a driver turning left must only make sure that the intersection is clear and is not required to anticipate a distant, oncoming car doing 100 miles an hour.

Brett Panter, an attorney representing Luis Jerez’s family, says the blood-alcohol finding of the Chevette’s driver “is irrelevant because of the speed of the Corvette. It was like a torpedo. Anyone would have pulled out (into the intersection).”

Eventually, a judge or jury may assign blame. But assessing true guilt may be impossible.

In Cromwell’s sociology class, several students expressed the anger they felt when they read about the crash, and their horror in picturing the deaths and injuries of so many people their own age.

“There was no sense that they wanted to burn this kid,” Cromwell says. “The consensus in class has been that there are contributory aspects here, that although Francisco should be responsible for his behavior, the parents contributed.

“I was angry myself when I first heard family members say, ‘It’s not his fault; he’s just a baby.’ But then I thought, they’re probably right.”