A Life Finally Found Lost in Hit-and-Run

The man with the ponytail lived like some lonely old drifter, meeting many people but finding only a few who would ever know him well. He was married once, he told people, but she treated him badly. And the only living relative he mentioned, a stepfather in Mexico, never liked him.

And so Calvin Carrera wandered, sustaining himself with God and too many six-packs, looking for a place where people wouldn’t eventually ask him to go away. He’d tell people he hoped someday to get out of motels and halfway houses and into a place he could call home, even if it was just for a little while.

When he found it, his life turned around, friends say. He stopped drinking. And the 49-year-old started making a good wage for the first time in his life. “He was in heaven,” said Mario Mendoza, who rented Carrera a spare room in Santa Ana. “He became part of my family. He was my friend.”

Carrera last week also became the fourth person this year to die after being hit by a car in Santa Ana, one of the deadliest cities in the state for pedestrians. The Times is profiling the lives of the victims as part of an effort to draw attention to the problem.

The few people who knew Carrera, if they even know he is dead, are saying prayers, stunned by the randomness of it all. But, they say, Carrera’s death somehow also makes sense. After searching for most of his life, Carrera finally had found the place he’d been looking for.

Carrera didn’t drive. In 1997, he was arrested for drinking and driving. Since then, he told friends, he refused to buy another car because as he fought his drinking, he did not want the temptation of driving. Besides, he didn’t have the money.

So Carrera took the bus, or walked, in a part of the world where living without a car is like living without soul. What bothers those who knew Carrera, people with cars and commutes and money, is the horrible irony in his death: His lack of a car sent him walking in front of one.

The service manager at Tustin Chevrolet, where Carrera had a job washing cars since 1993, said it is more than Carrera’s death that stings; it also is the guilt he feels for not trying to know him beyond as an employee. And the way Carrera died, so anonymously, is like a cold drop of sweat on his spine.

“The final chapter of Calvin’s life is unacceptable,” said Kirk Daeley. “His life was already too hard. But a hit-and-run, at night on the road. He was walking home. The [driver] didn’t even give him the respect to stop. . . . I don’t understand it. . . . I can’t understand it.”

To be sure, unlike a gang killing, or a hateful student rampage, or even a plane crash, there are few deaths as indiscriminate, or quite so unpredictable, as those of pedestrians hit by cars. It seldom has anything to do with class or race or gender, but rather more with the simple randomness of two things meeting that should never meet. The victims’ lives, poor or rich or long or short, are plucked away, and the drivers almost never mean to do it; it simply happens.

His friends and co-workers aren’t sure where he was born or where his family lives--or if he even has one. He would wonder wistfully about letters from his mother, but didn’t really know if she was alive.

They don’t know where he went to school, where he worked before or if he ever had children. They do know he sometimes went to church, and once had a drinking problem.

During the last year and a half, Carrera’s life turned around. He had finally found a place to live, a real home, in Santa Ana. He lived in the Mendoza family’s small, beige stucco house with neat deep-green grass in a yard embroidered with rosebushes.

Apart from work, he seldom left; when he did it was only for a short while, to his favorite restaurant in Tustin, Pineapple Hill. However small, he had found family: “Once we went to San Francisco for a night. We didn’t tell him,” Mendoza said. “He was mad. . . . He was worried about us.”

With the new stability, his demeanor brightened, say co-workers. Customers remembered his friendly greetings long after visiting Tustin Chevrolet, where he detailed cars and shuttled clients.

“He always had a tough life, but he came to work smiling,” said Pat Long, general manager of the dealership. Co-workers remember Carrera locking cars in the lot at the end of the day, running between the massive pickup trucks, his shoulder-length black hair tied back, bouncing to the beat of the Christian radio music he favored.

Carrera’s life ended about 11 p.m. last Sunday on the pavement while crossing 17th Street near a taco restaurant in the 1200 block. A witness told officers about a red or burgundy Dodge Colt or Plymouth Horizon that hit him and kept going. He was pronounced dead at Western Medical Center-Santa Ana from chest wounds at 2 a.m. Monday.

With 12 such deaths in the year ending June 1998, Santa Ana was on a per capita basis the third deadliest city in the state for pedestrians, and the most dangerous in Southern California. Already in 1999 four pedestrians have died in the city.

The city has been trying to do something about the problem, adding jaywalking patrols, crosswalks and traffic signals, and launching a new public education campaign designed for the city’s large Latino population. Since March, police have issued nearly 1,500 jaywalking citations and about 250 tickets to motorists who didn’t give way to pedestrians.

Police say the large number of accidents has several causes. One is the pedestrians themselves, who--perhaps because they are too comfortable with their neighborhood or perhaps because they live in older parts of town where folks do most of their errands on foot--regularly jaywalk across major boulevards. When he died, Carrera was not two blocks from where he lived.

Another reason is that motorists often speed on Santa Ana’s narrow streets.

Carrera’s case is unclear. It is not known if the driver of the car was speeding, or if Carrera, who had had a few beers to celebrate a friend’s birthday, had wandered aimlessly into the road. Police said Carrera was walking home.

Just after he died, his co-workers were haunted with old stories about Carrera. Once his car broke and he walked, miles, the rest of the way to work, apologizing profusely. When he had no place to live, it almost was impossible to convince him to accept a raise and some help from his boss. He was known for washing cars and rolling up windows at the hint of rain, without being asked.

But only a week after Carrera’s death, the memories of him are starting to fade. Life at the Chevrolet dealership has returned to normal and somebody else is washing the cars and changing the lightbulbs.

Carrera still lays unclaimed at the medical examiner’s office. There is nobody to bury him. Police and friends cannot find any of his family. Carrera’s stepfather reportedly lives in Mexico City, but nobody knows how to reach him.

Soon, Mendoza will clean out Carrera’s room. “I didn’t clean it yet because I hope he might come back. I feel very bad. I didn’t know much about him. I wish I knew more. The last time I talked to him he just kept hugging me and asking me if I was having a good time. It was my birthday.”

As it stands, the room that Carrera called home for the last year and a half of his life is intact. It contains four changes of clothes, some saltines, a bed and an old television. Also there, in a drawer, was the one and only letter Mendoza remembers Carrera getting: a bank statement saying he had $300.