A Market’s Pleasant Din Turns to Screams, Chaos

The noise hit them first -- the loud thumps, the roar of an engine and the desperate shrieks that drowned out the din of a bustling farmers market.

Julia Tamai dropped the vegetables she was putting away when she heard it, and turned from her stand on 2nd Street in time to catch the blur of the maroon car barreling down Arizona. She froze, then ran.

It was only minutes before closing time at the Wednesday Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, a magnet for Los Angeles’ restaurant and cooking community. The two-block stretch of tents and tables is a place to talk cuisine, gab with friends, and shop for white peaches or Persian mulberries.

The usual crowd had gathered: moms with strollers, retirees, panhandlers, white-jacketed chefs and the farmers, many of them as much a fixture of Santa Monica as the beach, the pier and the Ferris wheel.

Some tried to dodge. Others chased after the speeding car. Hundreds of people froze before a scene they compared to a bomb blast, an earthquake, a hurricane, a terrorist attack.

Jamie Gean Niswander, who sells strawberries at Harry’s Berries, between 2nd and 3rd, was sitting on her ice chest, counting money at the family stand.

“I heard a noise, like a bunch of banging, people yelling. I thought it was the wind picking up somebody’s tent -- that happens. Or maybe a fight,” she said. “I heard my brother yell; he thought it was a bomb. I could feel the wind in front of it, then I saw this red flash. I knew it was a car, I saw it fly by.

” ... I thought it was terrorists,” she said. “Then I looked down at our stand. Everything was gone.”

Niswander saw a body on the street and said she knew at a glance that the woman was dead. A man with mangled legs sprawled behind the Harry’s Berries truck.

“His legs were broken,” Niswander said. “I didn’t see him fly by, but I don’t know how else he got from the customer side of the table to behind the truck. It happened so quick.”

Niswander left in horror and confusion. “We drove my brother’s car to the beach,” she said. “We parked there and cried.”

Parker Hall was standing on Arizona between 2nd and 3rd. “You could hear a noise coming down the street, and everybody was looking around,” he said. “Then you could see stuff flying up in the air and scattering.”

The car passed about three yards from Hall. He remembered odd details: how the driver’s hands were in the textbook position -- 10 o’clock and 2 o’clock on the wheel.

The driver didn’t seem to be in pain, he said. He wasn’t struggling with the wheel. He just motored along, running down tents and people.

A group of farmers and shoppers ran in the deadly wake of the car, which lurched to a sudden stop, with a body embedded in the windshield, Hall said. The driver sat in his car; some farmers pulled him out, he added.

Izzy Levitansky, a 19-year-old from Santa Monica who manned a Chabad youth center table at Arizona and 2nd, jumped out of the way and saw the car plow through his table, scattering pamphlets and candles.

“This guy was running after him,” Levitansky said. “He was chasing the car. He said, ‘I’m going to kill this guy. I’m going to kill this guy.’ ”

People surrounded the Buick LeSabre after it finally came to a stop in front of the last stand at the market.

“There was a dead man on top of the car and a woman under the car,” Tamai said. “A bunch of guys lifted the car up. It kind of rolled backward.”

The woman was conscious. She could move, Tamai recalled, but she was badly hurt. “No one wanted to touch her, but I went to first aid and CPR classes, so I had some idea what to do -- talk to her, make sure she was conscious,” Tamai said.

Tamai, 23, saw the driver slowly walk to the side of the street. “He just looked like he was in shock, disoriented,” she said. “He just kind of walked away. People were yelling at him: ‘Murderer,’ all kinds of obscenities. That’s when a cop went over to him.”

Tamai scanned the street. “At every stand, you saw one or two people laying down hurt, shoes, hats, a lot of blood, head injuries,” she said.

Lynne Carter of Santa Monica had walked ahead of her 83-year-old husband, Lacey, to buy some tangerines when she heard the roaring engine.

“Suddenly I heard this car bearing down on me,” she said. “The car was careening down the street, bodies flying everywhere. So I stepped behind a vegetable stand and got out of the way.”

It sounded, she said, “like the accelerator could have been stuck -- it was floored. There was a very loud roar coming from the car like when you gun the accelerator.”

Carter immediately began searching for her husband. “I was screaming my lungs out,” she said. “There was no one to help, because everyone was in need of help.”

After about 10 frantic minutes, she found Lacey on the ground, bleeding from his mouth and nose.

Her husband’s screams, though, were only part of an anguished chorus. “Everybody was wailing and crying,” she said.

Not far away, Randall Tunnell, 46, of Burkart Farms in Dinuba, crossed Arizona Avenue to deliver some of his San Joaquin Valley nectarines to another vendor.

“I heard people screaming and saw the car coming down the street,” he said. “My first reaction was to get to my people. The tables were wiped out at my stand.

“There was a woman lying face down next to our truck, bleeding from the mouth. I tried to see if she was alive,” he said. “A few minutes later, a doctor who had been at the market took her pulse and told me to keep her still, just to keep talking to her and not let her move.

“About five minutes later, the firemen got there and tagged her,” Tunnell added. “I guess they determined she wasn’t critical. I stayed with her till they came back and took her away on a gurney in about 15 minutes.”

Farther down Arizona, Laura Avery, the market’s manager, was standing near the Winchester Cheese stand, kibitzing with farmers. It was a slow day, she said. Farmers were packing up.

Avery estimated that the car was going 50 mph as it bore down on the farmers market booth at 2nd and Arizona. A volunteer who was taking a sales inventory leaped over the table, and the car passed right behind her.

Bill Coleman, a market veteran, was wending his way to the market’s booth, pausing to visit with other farmers, men and women he has known for years.

“I heard this kind of a funny wail coming from up toward 4th Street,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was. It sounded almost mechanical. I realized it was people screaming. All of a sudden, bam! There it was, throwing stuff every place -- tents and trucks and tables and vegetables. You see that stuff in the movies.

“The whole thing took two minutes, if that,” he said. “The guy must have been going 65 to 70 miles an hour anyway. The whole managers’ place just blew up. That’s when we realized, ‘Oh, my God, it was a car.’ ”

He checked on all his buddies to see if they came out all right. All of them did.

“It was like one of those bombings or something you see in the news,” Coleman said.

Alex Bohr, 23, was coming out of a job interview at an Old Navy store nearby.

“It looked like something from a movie shoot,” he said. “There was a sneaker in the middle of the road and then bodies everywhere. You saw so many injured people that there weren’t enough people to help them.”

Bobbie Scott, a Santa Monica street musician, was strolling through the market with a local pastor. He bought some apples, then spotted the car racing by. “It was over very quickly,” said Scott, 34. He had his Bible with him, and after the crash, he waved it in the air above the dead and the injured as they were being treated.

Dave Baxter, a 34-year-old production coordinator who lives in West Los Angeles, was headed back to his car after eating falafel when “I hear this crashing noise and I see one of the fruit stands tumble and I wonder, ‘Is it a quake?’ ”

The car came toward him and hit a woman. For a moment, she lingered on the bumper before she was dragged under the vehicle. “I saw her disappear under the car,” he said. He remembered it was 1:45 p.m.

Afterward, Avery said, “all these people just came together. Businessmen covering up people’s eyes, so they weren’t in the sun; lending people cell phones to call home. Everybody wanting to know, ‘What can I do to help? ‘“

An hour later, rain began to fall. Arizona was covered with the red tarps ripped from produce stands for the wounded to lie on. Sirens wailed. A helicopter landed in the street, picked up one of the injured, then headed to a nearby hospital.

Firefighters in yellow jackets and police officers stood where shoppers had been, while a crowd gathered at each end of the market. Some of the stands were dismantled. Others still stood, the shoppers gone but their produce on display.

A woman who would not give her name grew frantic because her car was in a parking lot cordoned off by police tape.

“How could I be OK?” she said. “Dead bodies, dead children, dead bodies everywhere. I have to get out of here!”

Several feet from her, local activist Jerry Rubin said he had come down to the farmers market to meet his wife, Marissa, who shops there every week. Instead, he encountered pandemonium. “I was just going to meet her and pick up some strawberries,” he said. “Instead, there’s all this.”

He clutched his face, trying to hold back tears. “Oh, my God, Marissa. I’m so worried about her. I see these bodies being wheeled by in stretchers and my heart.... “

After the couple found each other, Marissa Rubin looked at the clouds and said, “That’s God’s tears coming down.”