The Hurt of Injury to Others Ends a Life of Pain : Tragedy: Fiercely independent, Greg Peek had endured paralysis since age 10. But he couldn’t live with the thought of hospitalizing two children in a car crash.

It crushed Greg Peek that a boyhood injury made it impossible for him to become a father. And as he moved through his adult life with seeming confidence--paralyzed yet built like a wrestler, full of quick wit, boundless energy and a disarming smile--it was being around children that made him the happiest.

Which was why, when he accidentally drove his car into several of them two Sundays ago in Lancaster, he could not stand to be alive.

Peek’s long voyage to that terrible moment began in 1979, at age 10, when he fell over the side of a 50-foot cliff while his family picnicked at a Ventura County park. It had been raining. He was playing on some rocks. And then he was gone. They found him below in a freezing stream.

Lying still in a hospital room, unable to move his legs, hearing words like severed spinal cord and paralyzed , Greg asked his mother a question:

“Mommy, does this mean I won’t be able to have children?”

He would not. Yet fathering children was about the only thing the strikingly handsome Peek could not do.

Confined to a wheelchair, he nonetheless lived alone in a three-bedroom house in Lancaster and planted rosebushes throughout the yard. He drove a Pontiac Firebird, customized so he could work all the controls with his hands, and refused to park in handicapped spaces. He went camping and to the ballet. He dated and was the ringmaster of a large circle of friends.

On April 23 Peek was driving his Firebird to see the wildflowers in the foothills around Palmdale with two friends. At the intersection of Avenue K and 30th Street West, he ran a red light, possibly because he was momentarily blinded by the setting sun. His car crashed into the side of a BMW.

Peek, 27, pulled himself into his wheelchair and moved toward the crushed BMW, now on its top. As he got closer, he saw the children inside, bleeding.

“He was saying, ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God. There’s children in there, there’s children in there. I didn’t see the light.’ ” said Michael Mosback, a witness to the accident.

In a few minutes, help arrived. Again, the sirens were wailing, emergency lights swirling and paramedics were frantically working on little bodies.

Peek turned away from the awful scene. He quietly rolled his wheelchair to the side of the road and pulled out the handgun he wore for protection.

And then, without a further word to anyone, he shot himself in the head.

“He was in pain every day of his life,” said Peek’s stepfather, Allen Hoey, “so death offered no sting. What he couldn’t stand was pain in other people.”

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A week after the accident--from which the children in the other car are expected to fully recover--Peek’s family and friends looked back on his life. Sitting in a circle in the living room of the Hoeys’ spotless tract home in Lancaster, they switched from past tense to present, the way people do when they talk about dead loved ones.

“He was our heartbeat,” said Allen Hoey, holding the hand of Peek’s mother, Donna. “He’s our conscience.”

From the waist up, Peek swelled with muscles, his shoulders, back and chest built primarily by hoisting his wheelchair in and out of his car. He inherited the dark, warm eyes and olive skin of his mother’s Italian ancestors. And he dressed impeccably, often in tuxedos and silk shirts, even if his destination was a simple dinner at his parents’ house.

In his car at the time of the accident were a beige linen suit jacket and a blue bow tie--this for a trip to the Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve.

The fine clothes and the bulk of his upper body could not conceal the legs atrophied by 17 years of disuse. His limited mobility was the reason he carried the gun, family members said, an equalizer acquired after he was accosted in Downtown Los Angeles.

Raised, along with older brother Eric and younger sister Jennifer, by his mother, Greg wheeled his chair through Agoura High School and later Pierce College, where he majored in psychology. When his mother married Allen Hoey six years ago, Peek moved to the Antelope Valley to be near them.

There were long stays in the hospital related to his injuries, but Peek had friends to help him through these times. In 1992, while Peek was in the midst of a six-month stint in the hospital, his best friend, Alan Arkin (who along with Alan’s girlfriend was in the car with Peek at the time of the accident) bribed a hospital security guard and delivered Peek an after-hours, full-blown bedside party, complete with pizza, beer and girls.

Despite his upbeat demeanor, however, Peek’s life was far from that of an idealized poster boy.

He desperately wanted to work, but the jobs he coveted went to applicants who could walk. He got a job six years ago as a clerk at a J.C. Penney store, but the store closed shortly after he started. It was Peek’s only full-time job; most of the time his primary income came from Social Security.

Fiercely independent, Peek was able to live by himself and drive a car. But his lack of steady work made him feel incomplete, and was the source of his rare complaints about his condition.

“That pained him every single day,” Allen Hoey said.

Peek was too proud to allow a girlfriend to help with some of the daily physical aspects of his disability, and all his dates quickly became “just friends,” according to his sister, Jennifer.

“They didn’t have a problem with it, Greg did,” said Jennifer, 23. “He had a lot to offer, and he was doomed never to share those gifts.”

While he nagged his sister and brother incessantly to hurry up and have babies, Peek’s constant companion was Sammy Malone, a Chesapeake Bay retriever named for a television character. When Peek decided to get a dog, he insisted it come from a shelter. “He didn’t want a puppy because everyone takes the puppies,” his sister said. “Sam was on the list to get gassed.”

Greg was, said Allen Hoey, “the kind of guy most people today just wouldn’t understand.”

After a years-long search for a direction in his life, Peek began paralegal studies last year, with hopes of becoming an advocate for children. He also talked of earning a pilot’s license to run rescue missions for children in troubled countries.

He was not, his friends and family said, a man ready to die.

In explaining their son’s death, Donna and Allen Hoey--both staunch Catholics--arrived at the same spiritual conclusion. Greg, they said without hesitation, offered himself in trade for the lives of the bleeding children. It was a deal, they said, he made with God.

And they believe God has fulfilled the divine end of the bargain. The most seriously injured of the children, 6-month-old Jade Lewis, is expected to leave the hospital this week. “A sacrifice,” Allen Hoey said, matter-of-factly. “God will exchange.”

For Eric, Peek’s brother, the explanation comes not so easily.

“He’s free,” Eric said, his voice cracking. “He’s running around. He’s not stuck in a wheelchair.

“That’s the only thing that helps me.”