Santa Ana’s Grim Safety Record Has Human Side

She used a butter knife to represent Broadway, a spoon for 15th Street. A tiny motorcycle missing its front wheel and a toy tractor represented the cars that were creeping into the Santa Ana intersection that day.

As Maria Mendoza sat in her dining room, mapping out how it happened, how her little boy got run over, she saved one particular spot for her index finger.

“Aqui,” she said, jabbing her finger under the wheels of the tractor. “Impacto.”

Here. Impact.

Last year, she was walking her son to a medical clinic, edging into a crosswalk, when a car struck him. Maria, in the midst of a lecture about pedestrian safety when the car hit, held that little hand with all her might, until she couldn’t hold on anymore. Next thing she knew, Edwin had been dragged three doors down.

Edwin, now 6, survived, but, like hundreds of others in Santa Ana who have been hit by cars, he has scars that remain. And some aren’t so lucky--seven pedestrians died in 1999 on the streets of Santa Ana, the city with the highest pedestrian death rate in Southern California.

In City Hall and Sacramento, the city’s grim safety record is bandied about with statistics and engineering studies. But on the streets of Santa Ana, the problem--an epidemic, really--has a face.

It is the face of Edwin Mendoza, now recovered physically from his wounds, but paralyzed with fear when he is forced to cross the street.

It is the face of Eva Vasquez, struggling to smile though her head remains shaved and scarred after an accident on 15th Street.

It is the face of Francisca Chavez, still fretting over her chile rellenos--her son’s favorite--because she can’t believe he’s dead.

This is their story.

*

Nearly 74% Latino, Santa Ana is a place where grocery stores accept pesos, where coin laundries offer “jabon gratis” (free soap), where a billboard on Main Street boasts: “Cerveza is better than beer.”

Unlike other urban problems, this one can’t be hidden. It’s storming through the busiest thoroughfares of Orange County’s largest city. For some in Santa Ana, the automobile--so critical to Southern California living that it can seem an adjunct family member--is more an emblem of loss, of danger, of the unique conflict posed by a pedestrian town trapped in a car-crazy region.

A drive down Main Street reveals a boy leading his grandmother across four lanes of traffic, a mother carrying sacks of corn meal across a busy thoroughfare with three children in tow, a young couple skulking along a double yellow traffic line like a tightrope while negotiating another harrowing walk to the mercado.

Most everyone in Santa Ana has a story to tell--a brush with death on Flower Street, a close call on Harbor Boulevard. Among mothers, fathers, kids, merchants, there are few degrees of separation--if they don’t know a victim personally, they know someone who does.

Two weeks ago, Lucio Vargas watched a woman negotiate her way across the 400 block of Bristol Street. The woman was pregnant, and she held a child by the hand as she jaywalked.

“She was running,” Vargas said. “She was in danger.”

The woman’s dash made Vargas uneasy--less than a year earlier, his brother was killed by a hit-and-run driver on the same block. The brother, 31-year-old Rene Reymundo Vasquez, was just a block away from the home he shared with his mother, two brothers, a sister-in-law and four nieces and nephews.

His mother, Maria Isabel Vargas, left El Salvador in the early 1980s to craft a better life for her three sons. He arrived to join her in 1996, on Mother’s Day.

“I was a single mother and I wanted better for my sons,” Vargas, tears spilling from her eyes, said in an interview last week. “I feel empty without him.”

*

People who can pay their bills stuff them in briefcases, scatter them on desktops, lose them in a stack of magazines. People who can’t pay the bills coddle them like money itself, and so it goes inside Eva Vazquez’ cramped Santa Ana apartment, where the documents are neatly creased, tucked inside a plastic bag and given their own seat on the couch.

It was Halloween, a Sunday, and 13-year-old Juan Carlos Bustamente was complaining about a cut on his foot. Vazquez, his 40-year-old mother, took him and his sister to the 99 Cent Store at Main and 15th streets for some gauze and medicine.

When the trio left the store and tried to cross 15th Street, they were waved across by the driver of a pickup truck. But in an instant, with the squeal of brakes and the sound of metal folding into metal, another car rear-ended the truck that was just inches from her side.

Somehow, the children escaped serious injury. Vazquez hit the truck’s hood, then was dragged under. Wedged in the truck’s tires, she was pushed into the middle of the intersection. Unable to move, her head soaked with blood, her dress nearly torn from her body, she could hear Juan Carlos shrieking, demanding that strangers lift the truck off his mother. Her daughter fainted.

Wounded on her head, legs, knees and ankles, Vazquez was rushed to UCI Medical Center, where she remained for four days. Today, a section of her head remains shaved and scarred. She has persistent headaches and never feels rested.

“I go to sleep but I don’t sleep,” she said.

And there are the bills, dozens of them, piled neatly on her couch. Vazquez pulled out one for the paramedics alone: $707.45. The biggest, from the medical center, is for $21,459.51. “It might as well be for a million dollars,” her mother, Paula, mumbled while bustling around the apartment.

Money--or the lack of it tends to widen the impact of the grief caused by pedestrian accidents. Vazquez, for example, cannot afford insurance. She has applied for aid through Medi-Cal, the state’s health insurance program for the poor, but she knows there are no guarantees.

Unable to continue working at a Costa Mesa packing plant, she told her children earlier this month that they would not be receiving holiday presents.

*

For some families shaken by a pedestrian accident, the worries go far beyond money. Elsa Vasquez (no relation to Eva Vazquez) knows her son is in pain but feels helpless to do anything about it.

Two years ago, her son Edgar, then 7 years old, was walking alone to Pio Pico Elementary School when he was hit by a car at Flower and Highland streets. The impact shattered his leg. Doctors had to put a metal plate in his leg, and he stayed in the hospital for a month.

The hospital and the state helped pay those bills, but the costs of the accident--which was blamed on Edgar, and not covered by the driver’s insurance--continue today.

Earlier this month, Elsa Vasquez sat outside her South Garnsey Street apartment. The electricity switches on and off regularly at the apartment, which she shares with a boyfriend and seven of her eight children. Her dog, Oso, chained behind the house, barks incessantly, heard but not seen.

Edgar still walks with a limp. He tries to play soccer and roller-skate with other kids in the neighborhood, but he tires quickly and retreats to the house. He has nightmares, and he often crawls into her bed in the middle of the night. Vasquez knows he needs more medical help--but the aid has dried up, and she has no job and no health insurance.

“Sometimes, I get sad when I look at him,” she said. “I know he needs a doctor.”

*

In 1979, Francisca Chavez gathered her eight sons on her farm in Chihuahua, Mexico, and set out for the border. In Agua Prieta, the border town, she and her boys crawled through a hole in a barbed wire fence and walked into Arizona.

In May, 34-year-old Victor Hugo Chavez--the sixth of her eight sons--was killed while crossing North Euclid Street in Santa Ana.

For the most part, despite a 1989 workplace accident that debilitated her left arm, the United States has treated Francisca Chavez well. Now 64 years old, she often worked two jobs, and she eventually saved enough money to buy and sell two houses. Her living room is coated with photos of her boys, their wives and her 13 grandchildren.

“Vivemos bien,” she said. “We live well.”

But she will never recover from the death of her son, she says. Seven months later, she can’t even bear to get rid of the dry cleaning he had waiting for him the night he died. It’s still hanging in the closet. There are no Christmas decorations in the apartment, either. That was always his job.

“There is nothing bigger than your children,” she said. “There is no way to explain it. You’re always crying. You can’t eat without thinking that he is not eating. You can’t fully enjoy things because his memory is in the back of your mind. You feel like tearing at yourself because you can’t stand it.”

*

On average, more than 100 pedestrians have been hit by cars on Santa Ana streets in each of the last four years--and they have often been the city’s most vulnerable residents.

A Santa Ana Unified School District study conducted earlier this year found that nearly half the pedestrian accidents involved children walking near campuses and that young Latinos and African Americans, who often depend on walking and bicycling, are in particular danger. Senior citizens also report that they have trouble making their way across the city’s streets.

Authorities have said that drivers routinely speed through crosswalks without looking for pedestrians--and often ignore the commands of school crossing guards. Two crossing guards have been hit in the last year, including one whose legs were both broken.

Three of the drivers who killed pedestrians this year sped away.

But often, police said, pedestrians themselves contribute to the accidents by jaywalking or acting recklessly.

Police found the pedestrian “at fault” in six of the seven fatal accidents this year--including the April accident that claimed the life of 76-year-old Natalia Gonzalez. Gonzalez was crossing the street in front of her house, en route to church, when a van struck her and threw her to the pavement. She died of head injuries.

According to coroner’s reports, five of the seven pedestrians killed in 1999 were legally drunk--including one man who was hit while toting a beer can and another whose blood-alcohol level was four times the state’s legal limit for driving.

Traces of cocaine were found in one man’s blood, and traces of methamphetamines were found in another man’s blood.

Overall, however, drug or alcohol use is rarely a cause of such crashes. A Times analysis of city accident reports found that alcohol or drug use was cited in 6% of the crashes that police blamed on pedestrians.

The one deceased pedestrian not blamed by police this year was Angelica Saravia, 47. The mother of two became Santa Ana’s seventh pedestrian fatality in October when she was struck in a predawn accident just steps from her Broadway bus stop, where she used daily on her journey to a restaurant job in Laguna Beach.

The Times began a series of stories on Santa Ana’s pedestrian safety record earlier this year after a UC Irvine study found the city to have the highest pedestrian fatality rate in Southern California.

A Times review of hundreds of accidents reports revealed several “clusters” in Santa Ana with especially high numbers of pedestrian injuries and deaths. Another article reported that Santa Ana and many other cities across the state were raising speed limits--possibly resulting in more accidents in some cases.

On one stretch of Warner Avenue in Santa Ana, for example, the number of accidents doubled since officials increased speed limits by 5 mph. Orange boosted the speed limits on 85% of its streets in 1994; between 1995 and 1998, the number of accidents rose 21%, a Times analysis of records revealed.

Officials are seeking remedies. After an article about the increasing dangers facing school crossing guards, Santa Ana police agreed to post officers near some campuses to ticket motorists who speed through crosswalks and narrowly miss children walking to school.

Based in part on the pedestrian dangers in Santa Ana, the state Legislature this fall allocated $20 million to improve safety for children as they walk to school. The money could be used to install new traffic lights, crosswalks and other safety improvements.

And an Orange County assemblyman plans to introduce a bill next month that would double fines for drivers who violate traffic rules near schools, parks and other areas with heavy pedestrian activity.

*

Families who lost loved ones to pedestrian accidents often are left haunted with memories.

For Marcelo Torres, 16, and his sister, Maria “Maya” Torres, 22, it’s the years their mother spent toiling to bring them to the United States from their native Bolivia--only to die less than two years later.

Their mother, Angelica Saravia, had saved money for more than six years, often working two jobs at once, to reunite her family. A year and half ago, Saravia was finally able to bring the kids to the United States, and their father was to join them this Christmas.

On Oct. 4, at 4:44 a.m.--Saravia always left the house for work at 4:45 a.m. sharp--she spent a moment whispering to her son while the rest of the family slept.

“Te vas a cuidar,” she told him. “Take care of yourself.”

She shut the door behind her. Less than 15 minutes later, she was dead--killed by a van just steps from her bus stop at the notorious intersection of Broadway and 15th Street.

*

Young Edwin Mendoza survived his accident last year at the same intersection. But the violent collision has transformed his life, and his mother’s--causing emotional wounds that are proving slow to heal.

Edwin, who dislocated his hip in the accident, has recovered physically. He lumbers around their apartment double-fisting bananas and Chee-tos, offering a sheepish grin to even the whisper of kindness.

Even as the scars heal, however, vestiges of the accident linger. Edwin freezes when he has to cross the street. His mother finally allows him to buy candy in front of the apartment with the other kids, but after five minutes she gets nervous and runs down there, just to catch a glimpse, like you’d wake a sleeping baby to make sure he’s still breathing.

“It’s like a bad dream,” said Maria Mendoza, 31, who came to the United States six years ago from Nayarit, on the Pacific coast of Mexico. “It’s changed our life.”

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Pedestrian Deaths in Santa Ana

According to a UC Irvine study, Santa Ana has the highest pedestrian death rate in Southern California and one of the highest rates in the state. Despite a crackdown, seven pedestrians have been killed this year, surpassing the total for 1998.

THE DEATHS THIS YEAR

In February, Rene Vasquez was killing by a hit-and-run driver as he crossed the 400 block of South Bristol Street. Vasquez’ name and address were not known. * In April, Natalia Gonzalez, 76, of Santa Ana, was struck and killed while crossing Bristol Street. She was walking to church with her husband of 52 years.

* Also in April, Calvin Carrera, 49, of Buena Park, was killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing 17th Street.

* In May, Ramon Chaligo was killed while crossing the 2900 block of South Main Street. Chaligo’s age and address were not known. * Also in May, Victor Chavez, 34, of Anaheim, was struck and killed while crossing North Euclid Street at Westminster Avenue.

* In July, Alfredo Del La Sancha Aguirre, 41, of Orange, was killed by a hit-and-run driver while crossing West First Street.

* In October, Angelica Saravia, 47, of Santa Ana, was struck and killed by a van just steps from a bus stop at Broadway Avenue and 15th Street.

What’s Been Done?

* The city launched a campaign in March to improve pedestrian safety. As of Dec. 1, Santa Ana Police have issued more than 6,351 tickets to motorists who fail to yield to pedestrians and more than 2,898 jaywalking citations.

* City officials are also piecing together a separate plan to improve safety for children walking to school. A school district study found that nearly half of the city’s pedestrian accidents involve children walking near schools. The report also found that young Latinos and African Americans, who are more dependent on walking or bicycling than others, are especially vulnerable.

* A new law set aside $20 million to improve youth pedestrian safety across California. City officials have said they may use state funds to rebuild sidewalks and add traffic signals at problem intersections.

Source: UC Irvine, Santa Ana Police Department, Times Research