At the End of the Road

The image of the man lying in the middle of the road implants itself on the mind like the memory of a stormy day, all dark clouds and gloom.

I am both transfixed and horrified as I watch a dog emerge from out of the camera’s range to nudge the man’s body, then pull at it, a toy to be tested for life.

The drama ends as the camera widens to reveal a small group of policemen moving in slowly. The scene dissolves as they hover over him, and the world moves on.

Real violence as public theater has once more drawn a crowd on television.

The incident occurred almost two weeks ago, but I can’t get it out of my head. Michael Alan Thayer’s life drained away on a San Diego freeway and was offered up as it happened, live and in color. We could almost hear his last heartbeat.

Thayer’s death ended a three-hour chase by police that began in San Bernardino County when a sheriff’s deputy spotted expired registration tags on his car.

A parade of patrol cars pursued him through four counties. He stopped only when a spike strip laid down by the Highway Patrol punctured one of his tires on Interstate 805.

As cameras from five television news helicopters tightened in on him, Thayer emerged unsteadily from his car, displayed what appeared to be a gun and was brought down in a volley of more than 40 bullets. Seventeen hit him. He didn’t have a chance.

And then we moved on to other news.

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Once more television, pandering to our blood lust, has brought us a dark moment to ponder. Like ancient crowds at the Roman Colosseum, we gathered to watch death in a public arena and were mesmerized by it.

The line between fiction and reality has become blurred in the fading days of the 20th century. The death of Michael Thayer, a 49-year-old ex-con, could have occurred in any number of movies or TV series, after which he would have risen, wiped away the false blood and moved on to another role.

But this was real, the way the Gulf War was real, the way those smart bombs were real, the way the killings in Kosovo were real, however remote they seem on the face of the tube.

Long after the news programs had switched to other matters I sat staring at the screen. Few moments have affected me more than the last seconds of Michael Thayer’s life.

He imprints himself on memory not because of who he was or what he may have been attempting by brandishing a starter’s pistol in the face of real guns. Drugs or so-called suicide by cop may have motivated him, but that’s not the point.

The entire incident speaks to our fascination with car chases, or at least what television believes to be our fascination.

“What occurs on our freeways affects us all,” says KTLA co-anchor Terry Anzur, an assistant professor of journalism at USC who generally defends television’s coverage of car chases. “People watch and are grateful that what’s happening out there isn’t happening to them.”

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She and others cite similar coverage given the Kathy Fiscus case 50 years ago. She was a 3-year-old who fell down an abandoned well in San Marino.

We heard her faint cries on live television and watched as rescuers worked for 50 hours in a courageous but futile effort to save her. Television watched and listened with us.

Today, her grave marker identifies Fiscus as “a little girl who brought us together.” Those who defend the coverage of Michael Thayer’s death use the same phrase: It brings us together in moments of high drama.

They’re not the same. The effort to save a little girl in no way compares to the bloody end of a car chase. One was the celebration of the human spirit, a prayer offered up to preserve a small life. The other, as someone put it, was electronic voyeurism, violence without involvement.

If we are as fascinated by car chases as television thinks we are, it’s because there are so damned many of them, about 800 a year in L.A. alone.

The last one I saw was a few days ago. Channel 7 followed a stolen sport utility vehicle pursued by a line of patrol cars down Crenshaw Boulevard. As it flashed by an intersection, a man dressed as Santa Claus waved happily. It was an L.A. moment.

“We watch car chases for the same reason we watch the Super Bowl,” Anzur says. “To see the outcome. I wish it were different, but it’s not.”

So Michael Thayer lies in the street, shot down by cops, tugged at by a dog, and the ratings kick a notch higher in the theater of the dead.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Sundays and Wednesdays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com.