Boy, 15, Taking Late-Night Walk Killed by Hit-and-Run Driver

She loved him and fretted about him, doting one minute and scolding the next, until her boy’s head sometimes became a roar and he’d just have to lose himself in his music, alone in his room.

So after he fought with his mother over the usual--his studying and playing computer games until late into the night--Samsun Phan did something he had never done before.

And it became his mother’s--any mother’s--most awful day on Earth because it was the last time she would see him alive.

Donning his black trench coat and yanking on the stereo headphones, the 15-year-old honor student stormed out of his Newport Beach home. It was 11 p.m. Wednesday as he pounded along Coast Highway, blowing off steam.

Samsun neared Laguna Beach about 1:35 a.m. Thursday. He had been walking for 2 1/2 hours when the red Nissan Sentra “came flying down” the southbound lanes of Coast Highway, according to a California Highway Patrol officer.

The boy stepped slightly into the right-hand lane, a witness later told investigators. The car struck Samsun, then made a U-turn and fled.

Investigators have recovered a driver’s-side mirror that was knocked off in the collision. They said Friday that it will be sent to a crime lab to check for fingerprints. Investigators continued to contact body shops and windshield repair services to ask them to be on the lookout for the damaged Nissan Sentra, CHP Officer J.C. Rivas said.

When Lai Phan, 56, realized that her only son had left, she got in her car and began searching. Up and down the streets, peering into the shadows for the familiar shape.

She searched on. Only Samsun was heading in one direction, his mother in another.

“I drove all over. I never thought he would walk that way,” she said.

She even thought he might have stopped at a motel, so she drove from one to another, checking with desk clerks, showing them her son’s photo. Nothing.

Again she sped off through the darkness, even more afraid.

Much was on her mind.

She always felt guilt. Samsun’s father--Lai’s second husband--left shortly after the boy was born, returning on the occasional Christmas to drop off a present, a family member said.

So Phan said she tried to be both a mother and father to Samsun, but broke down at the thought of him having to learn to tie a tie from a friendly school administrator.

Phan had given up her search and was home by 2 a.m. The call came soon after.

“When the phone rang, I thought it would be him saying, ‘Mom, come pick me up,’ ” she recalled Friday. Instead, it was Hoag Memorial Hospital Presbyterian. She rushed to the hospital. Samsun died at 3:45 a.m. Thursday, having suffered severe trauma from the impact.

The mother had no idea how popular her son was at Santa Ana’s Mater Dei High School until Samsun’s classmates gathered to mourn Thursday. She learned that he was a rare combination of brain and class clown. Along with everything else, he managed a part-time job and took computer and math classes at UC Irvine.

He was a founding member of Mater Dei’s sailing club and the football team’s videographer, served in student government, and even was on the wrestling team for a while--until he had enough of being pinned by 300-pound opponents.

Back at the large, two-story house Samsun and his mother shared, family began gathering.

“God gave him to me and God took him away,” Lai Phan said. “He should have taken me away.”