Shouts and Whispers

In the clamor of noisy causes, quiet acts of human decency are often overlooked. We’re too overwhelmed by large crowds and loud voices to notice small moments in the life of a city.

That’s why I stand before you today in the midst of political shouts and social fist-shaking to ask, “Has anyone seen Mr. Gomez?”

He’s a Hispanic man in his late 30s or early 40s, probably homeless, and a last name is all we’ve got. When last seen, he was wearing old jeans and a green T-shirt.

Susan Cregger has an image of him, standing by her wrecked car, watching as she was being loaded, dazed and bleeding, aboard an ambulance.

“He looked pale and shaken,” she said the other day in the living room of her Mission Hills home. “I called to him, ‘What’s your name?’ I don’t know if he answered or not. That’s all I remember.”

He disappeared after that, down the endless corridors of big city anonymity, lost in the crowd of those “invisible people” who sleep in doorways and packing crates. If he’s around at all, he’s probably wandering the streets and hoping for a meal somewhere.

But what he did one sunshiny morning will never be forgotten by either Gregger or her 6-year-old daughter. He came out of the mist that hides the homeless just long enough to save that little girl’s life.

And now he’s her guardian angel.

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It happened last April.

Cregger, 32, was driving her ’97 Ford Escort on Mission Road just off the Hollywood Freeway. In the car was her mother, Fumiko Pearlman, and Cregger’s twin daughters, Emily and Katrina, riding in the back seat. All wore seat belts.

They were heading toward Little Tokyo to shop. Cregger had missed the Alameda Street offramp and turned off at Mission instead. When she discovered that Mission went nowhere, she headed back to the freeway.

She tells it: “I had stopped for a red light. When the light turned green I was just starting to move. I heard a loud noise and remember thinking, ‘Wow, someone just got hit.’ I don’t remember feeling any impact. It got awfully hot. . . .”

Cregger’s car had been struck by a pickup truck coming down the freeway offramp, according to a report by the California Highway Patrol. The heat she’d felt was from her air bags being deployed.

Confused by the impact, she looked to her mother, whose head was slumped forward. There was blood on her face. In the back seat, Emily seemed to be sleeping. Katrina, her face also bloody, said, “I’m all right, Mommy.”

Cregger: “I looked out the window and saw the driver of the pickup and the Hispanic man, Mr. Gomez. The driver was crying, and Mr. Gomez was saying to him, ‘What the hell were you doing?’ He helped my mother from the car and took Emily in his arms. Then suddenly he yelled, ‘Oh, my God, she’s blue! She’s not breathing!’ ”

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Cregger struggled from the automobile screaming hysterically, and just as she emerged, she heard a gasp and then a faint cry from Emily. “I don’t know what Mr. Gomez did,” she said the other day. “Whether he applied CPR or oral resuscitation or what. But Emily was alive.”

The others recovered from their injuries, and Emily, who suffered brain damage, is also slowly recovering. The impact caused swelling of the brain, which affected her ability to breathe. Doctors are hoping she’ll return to normal.

The little girl, meanwhile, has suffered from terrible nightmares as a result of the crash. She wakes in the middle of the night screaming and sobbing. To soothe the bad dreams, Cregger told her that a guardian angel, Mr. Gomez, had saved her and was watching over her.

In an effort to find him, Cregger hired an attorney, whose investigator went looking. The CHP report identified the man only as “Witness No. 1.” It was the Highway Patrol officer who later remembered him as Mr. Gomez and said he was homeless.

“I want to find him to reward him and to say thank you,” Cregger said, holding photographs of her daughters, dark-eyed little beauties. She had just returned from work, and they were still at a sitter’s. “I want to tell him that he’s watching over my little girl and is easing her nightmares. How many would jump in the way he did to help strangers in trouble?”

I don’t know the answer to that. People in large cities tend not to get involved. Leave it to the cops. Leave it to the paramedics. Leave it to someone else. Why did Mr. Gomez become the exception? Maybe he knows about pain. Maybe he’s been there.

The likelihood is he’ll never be found. But it’s still important that in the midst of clamor, when the very air trembles with the shouts of protest and political hallelujah, we pause to pay quiet tribute to a guardian angel who stopped to help.

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