Track of Their Tears

That was their son in there. Amid the smoke and steel and blood, that was the boy who once danced in his PJs at the sight of his first toy truck.

The boy who once wriggled in their laps as he steered their old Dodge.

The boy who once drew pictures of himself in a race car, stick legs on the gas, crayoned mouth smiling.

Their Casey.

“I’ve got to be with him,” said Jim Diemert, standing with his wife on the other side of a wall, a couple of hundred yards away. “I’ve got to get to my son.”

The racing official grabbed his arm.

“You need to wait here, sir,” he said.

“I can’t wait,” Jim Diemert said. And he leaped the fence and ran, down the asphalt backstretch, under a sticky Irwindale sky, sprinting toward death before they shoveled it away.

*

It happened at least three times last year in Southern California, maybe more. You never know, because people would rather you didn’t.

With the season opening of Irwindale Speedway tonight, it could happen again.

A driver could die.

A crew would clean up the mess.

The race would continue.

Death is treated so routinely in this sport, even as cars are becoming safer and fatalities fewer, one might think it’s not even death.

It’s a mangled car. It’s a video highlight. It’s an oil slick.

Racing fans mourn the loss of potential.

Racing detractors mourn the loss of common sense.

Relatively few are left to mourn the person.

This is a reminder that what dies is, indeed, a person.

This is the story of a 23-year-old Oregon kid named Casey Diemert.

He died in his sprint car a year ago, on March 27, spending his last moments during the first moments of the first practice run of the first racing day of the Irwindale Speedway.

On an early Saturday afternoon, with only a couple of dozen fans watching, his blue No. 73 sprint car ran over the rear wheel of a car that had swerved to avoid a stalled car.

Diemert’s car flipped and dived nose-first into the pavement, then somersaulted into the wall. Car parts scattered like bits of china from a dropped plate.

Then everything was swept up and forgotten.

During the opening festivities that night, there was no public announcement. No memorial lap. No moment of silence.

No mention that the smudge on the freshly painted wall between the third and fourth turns was left there by somebody’s son.

Somebody who hugged when he was happy. Somebody unafraid to cry when he hurt. Somebody who loved as fearlessly as he lived.

Behind him were parents who worried, who sometimes shook with worry, who today battle the demons of regret.

Around him were a sister who was his best buddy, a woman who could have soon been his wife, blustery friends who dissolve at his memory.

Casey Diemert was not necessarily a hero. But he was a person.

In our backyard, his sprint car flipped into a wall, pulling off the top of his skull while breaking his neck in three places.

One year later, we sprint to reach his death before they shovel it away.

*

Jim Diemert ran to within 100 feet of the accident, but still couldn’t see anything.

“Stay there, it’s bad,” shouted an official.

“I’ve got to see my son!” Diemert shouted.

A truck pulled up. Diemert was ordered inside.

“I’m not leaving my son,” he shouted again, brushing aside the tug of another official.

Finally, nearly half an hour after the crash, Casey Diemert was removed from what was left of the car.

There was blood on his face and a bandage around his head. His father reached for him but he was quickly carried into a nearby helicopter.

“I’m riding with him!” shouted Jim Diemert.

“You cannot ride with him,” an official said.

“But my son . . . “ Diemert said, softer this time.

*

They look back now, as all parents look back, even those blessed enough to have their children alive and well and coming to the house every weekend for dinner.

Did their son have to lead the life he led?

Did he have to do something as dangerous as driving race cars?

Couldn’t they have stopped him?

Sure, you can trot out the cliche about how he died doing what he loved. But what on earth taught him to love something filled with such pain?

“You wonder about it all the time, all the time,” said Roberta, his mother, during a recent interview from their home in the Oregon timber town of Roseburg. “You feel responsible. You wonder, should you have stopped him?”

The answer is probably one that all parents eventually realize when trying to direct the lives of their most precious possessions.

The answer is probably no.

How can you stop what was inborn?

It wasn’t Roberta or Jim, a self-made businessman whose hobby was building and driving race cars, who put that light in Casey’s eyes when he played with his first trucks.

Did they force him, when he was 3, to beg his mother to make the car go, “Urrrt,” imitating a sound of squealing tires?

Was it their fault he built and jumped ramps on his bike the same day he learned to ride it?

Was it his parents who sneaked out of the house in the middle of the night during his early high school years, not to drink or smoke, but simply to tool around town in their cars?

One of those nights when he was 15, Casey panicked after driving past police, and eventually eluded seven local officers before escaping into a cornfield.

When the police finally tracked him down a week later, they prefaced their reckless driving arrest with a compliment.

“I’ll tell you what,” the officer told his stunned father. “That boy can sure drive.”

His parents were so angry, they refused to allow him to get his conventional driver’s license, requiring him to wash dishes to pay off attorney fees and fines.

And yet the boy with sandy hair and a chrome smile would not be dissuaded.

“After his problems with the police he told me, ‘Dad, I’m sorry, I just had an incredible urge to drive,’ ” Jim said.

Casey paid back the money. He stopped sneaking out. He talked them into buying him an old Dodge Charger. At 16, he started banging around on the local racetrack.

“I thought, ‘I could thwart this or support this,’ ” Roberta said. “But then I would look at him, and how much he loved it, and thought, ‘How could I not support it?’ ”

Besides, they had already seen what happened if they ignored it.

“Sure, sometimes I think that if I had not been interested in racing, this never would have happened,” Jim said. “But then I realized it was going to happen anyway. And if he’s going to do it, I might as well help him do it safely.”

So they agreed to help him, teach him, watch him, like any Little League dad or soccer mom.

In her own special compromise, Roberta even agreed to film all of her son’s races, “So I would always be there for him.”

Watching those videos today, it is apparent that she was so nervous, her arms shook, making the pictures bounce.

*

The Diemerts huddled in an infield office holding hands while their son’s body was being lifted overhead.

They had both seen the crash from a distance, Jim had seen his son up close, yet they still had no idea.

“They are flying him to County-USC trauma center,” officials told them.

This qualified as good news. This meant there was something that could be done for him.

Moments later, plans changed.

“Now they’re going to Arcadia Methodist Hospital,’ said the official.

A minister told them maybe this was better. They looked at each other and knew it wasn’t.

Twenty minutes later, they had been driven to the hospital and left in a small room. A doctor walked in.

“It took us 20 minutes to extract him from the car,” the doctor said. “He didn’t have air for 20 minutes. We could not save him.”

“No! No! No!” Jim shouted.

“I’ve got to see my son,” Roberta shouted.

Again, their path was blocked, this time by three people standing in front of that small room’s only door.

“Let us clean him up,” one of them said. “We have to clean him up.”

*

Casey Diemert hated needles. The big, brave racer was scared to death of getting poked.

Perhaps his closest brush with death in a car had occurred not while navigating a turn at 100 mph, but while driving down a city street shortly after receiving a shot from the doctor.

Just thinking about the needle made him lose consciousness and he drove his car into a telephone pole.

Casey Diemert loved to sing. He would invite his sister Traci to visit him at nearby Oregon State, and they would hit the karaoke bars.

“Careless Whisper” was one of his songs. So was “My Way.”

Diemert’s way was to work as a safety director for an electric company during the day, work on cars at night, and race on weekends.

He didn’t live for the money--his biggest purse was $2,200--or the fame, because he lived in a trailer.

He lived to be able to hang out in the garage with his dad, to take his sister to lunch, to sleep wherever he got tired, at any number of houses of friends and relatives, on any form of bed or couch.

Shortly before his death, he had begun living for the time he spent with his new girlfriend, Stefanie Simpson.

They had been dating eight months. They had talked of settling down.

She had looked at his exposed sprint car one day and said, “Aren’t you ever afraid?”

He had said, “If I was, I couldn’t put everything into it.”

But he was nervous. His entire body would sometimes shake when he was getting into a car before a race.

Before his first big race, in Phoenix several years ago, his father was so overcome with the sight of his trembling son, of the excitement and fear, that he began crying into the headset.

“Dad, what’s wrong?” Casey asked through the radio.

Jim continued weeping.

“Aw, Dad,” Casey said.

It is in these memories that Casey Diemert lives today, with a memorial golf tournament, and an annual sprint car race in his name, and stickers with No. 73 appearing on windshields around Roseburg.

The well-intentioned folks at Irwindale have also tried to make good. They attended his memorial service and in later weeks ran memorial laps, had moments of silence and honored him in their program.

Officials say they didn’t announce his death that night because they didn’t know his parents had been notified, yet they were the ones who helped Jim and Roberta get to the hospital.

The Diemerts are no longer outraged by the snub, only a little sad.

“All they had to say was, ‘A young man lost his life here today,’ ” Jim said, sighing. “But I do understand that in racing, if you face the fact somebody dies, it means you can die too.”

*

Jim and Roberta Diemert walked into the sterile room where their dead son lay on a gurney.

The right side of his head was badly swollen. There were bruises and dried blood.

Only his legs were unscarred. They reached under the sheet and touched them, held them, perfect legs.

Roberta Diemert laid her head on the bare chest and softly whispered goodbye to a son, a brother, a friend, a person.

*

Bill Plaschke can be reached at his e-mail address: bill.plaschke@latimes.com.

Irwindale to Open Its Second Season

Tonight’s program features four classes of NASCAR Weekly Racing Series competition. Racing starts at 7 p.m.

STORY, PAGE 11