Seeking Justice Out of Tragedy

Rafael Becerra, a machinist who came to the United States 40 years ago with a sixth-grade diploma, sits on the tiny front porch of his Boyle Heights house, recounting the advice he gave all six of his children.

Study, study and study some more, he told them. To set an example, he earned his high school diploma while holding down a job.

In this house, the kids listened. Four of the six children of Rafael and Carmen Becerra went to college. Two became engineers, and another, Hector, is a reporter at The Times. The last of the six, Michelle, brought up the rear in style.

Brown University wanted the bright Roosevelt High graduate, and so did UC Berkeley and UCLA. Michelle chose the latter, majoring in art history, a passion she developed alongside her father, who accompanied her to museums.

She was only a few months shy of graduation when, on a warm January day, she and a longtime pal decided to walk from the Becerra house to Olvera Street in downtown L.A. The friend, Coral Arias, was no slacker, either, having just graduated from Brown.

Coral says they had no time to react to the car that came flying up from behind them on State Street as they crossed an intersection near the San Bernardino Freeway overpass, just a block and a half into their walk.

Police say an unlicensed, uninsured 17-year-old driver made a sudden and unsafe lane change, setting the accident in motion. Another vehicle swerved to avoid the teenager’s car, spun out of control and slammed into the two young women, both 22.

Coral, though banged up and in shock, was OK. She grabbed a cellphone and called Michelle’s father, telling him to come quickly.

“Don’t die!” Mr. Becerra pleaded with his daughter as she lay in the street.

He had driven his baby to school each morning for years, first in the neighborhood and more recently across the city to UCLA. Often he’d had just two hours of sleep after getting home from the graveyard shift. With all that time together, the self-educated father was able to feed his daughter’s intellectual curiosity.

“Don’t die,” he begged again as police pulled him away and a sheet was placed over Michelle’s body.

Three months later, as we sit on the porch near the koi pond and flower garden Michelle designed, Mr. Becerra smiles at his daughter’s memory. On those drives to UCLA each morning, Mr. Becerra and his daughter talked about books and art.

“She was full of dreams,” he says. “She wanted to run a museum.”

Carmen Becerra doesn’t enter her daughter’s bedroom, which has been left as it was -- shoes in a pile, glow-in-the-dark stars glued to the ceiling, art books neatly arranged and U2 and Depeche Mode posters on the wall -- nor will she pass the intersection where her daughter’s life ended.

Mr. Becerra, for his part, is more inclined to confront his grief head-on.

“I don’t hate the driver,” he tells me of the 17-year-old who is still awaiting trial on charges of vehicular manslaughter and driving without a license. But he wouldn’t mind if the boy received the maximum sentence of 18 months.

And he wants justice beyond what the courts do with the boy. As a parent who raised responsible and accountable children, shepherding the entire brood into the middle class, he thinks that parents of uninsured, unlicensed minors have to answer for their children.

In family conversations, he keeps insisting that they sue the parents of the 17-year-old. His adult children aren’t sure whether any attorney would take the case and whether it would accomplish anything. But they understand perfectly why, as countless unlicensed drivers zip through their neighborhood, their father needs to do something.

It’s not money Mr. Becerra is after. What he wants is accountability, and whatever thread of justice it brings.

This, by the way, wasn’t Michelle’s first encounter with an unlicensed driver. A little more than a year before she was killed, she was driving a car that was totaled when an adult woman with no license and no insurance plowed into her.

The two Central Division detectives who handled the investigation into Michelle’s death told me as many as half the drivers they encounter have no licenses or insurance. California Highway Patrol stats put East Los Angeles among the L.A. County leaders in both categories. In the last year, CHP officers working that sector have stopped 5,381 drivers without insurance and 3,930 without licenses.

One obvious reason for so many unlicensed drivers is the huge number of illegal immigrants. Mr. Becerra doesn’t know if either of Michelle’s accidents involved an illegal immigrant, but he thinks offering licenses to undocumented residents and requiring insurance would acknowledge reality and make the streets safer for everyone.

“I’ve heard the argument that they don’t want a special mark on the licenses,” he says. Such a designation is fine with him, because they’re here illegally, after all.

Obviously, having a driver’s license doesn’t guarantee safe driving. But going through the driver’s ed and testing process is better than nothing at all, and might make neighborhoods a little safer.

“Nobody has a license and insurance ... and on the Eastside, you’ re supposed to just deal with it,” says Francisco Becerra, a water district engineer and, at 41, the eldest of the six kids.

One woman who learned of Michelle’s death, but didn’t know the circumstances, asked Francisco if it was gang-related. He and his siblings seethe at the perception that if you die young on the Eastside, you must have been hanging around with the wrong people, and you probably wouldn’t have amounted to much anyway.

Michelle’s friend Coral, who is thinking of going to law school, told me that on the night before the fatal accident on State Street, they had driven past that very intersection in Coral’s car. Michelle talked about how dangerous it was.

“She was telling me it was so sad that cars just kept crashing around there, because they come speeding out of the off-ramp,” Coral says. “I remember her saying the only way it will change is if someone great died in a car accident there.”

After showing me his daughter’s room and flipping through the photo album of her life, Mr. Becerra took me to the place where she died. He is 61 and fighting prostate cancer while still holding down overnight shifts as a machinist.

We found some dried flowers and broken glass on the sidewalk near the place where Michelle died. Mr. Becerra took a few deep breaths, wiped his eyes and headed home.

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Reach the columnist at www.latimes.com and read previous columns at www.latimes.com/lopez