Valentina D’Alessandro was at a
party with a few girlfriends in 2013 when one of them got sick. They accepted
another teenager’s offer to drive the girls home in his red Mustang.In a
commercial area of Wilmington, at the intersection of two four-lane boulevards,
a car pulled up alongside the Mustang.The race began.Minutes later, Valentina,
16, was dead, her body wedged in a passenger side window following a crash.
Police found her high school identification card at the scene.She was one of at
least 179 people who have died in Los Angeles County since 2000 in accidents
where street racing was suspected, according to a Los Angeles Times analysis of
coroner’s records, police reports and media accounts from 2000 to 2017.Southern
California has long been an epicenter of high-speed car culture. Wild police
pursuits dominate television newscasts. The “Fast & Furious” film
franchise, which many cops blame for hyping street racing, was set in Los
Angeles.Police say incidents of street racing are on the rise, driven by
popular culture and the use of social media to draw contestants and evade
authorities. In what racers call “takeovers,” participants use their cars to
block off streets or intersections to stage races.In recent years, car clubs
from neighboring areas, including Orange County and the Inland Empire, have
begun traveling to Los Angeles to compete against local racing crews,
increasing the number of dangerous drivers in the county, investigators say.
“We have the locations. We have
lots of flat street. We have industrial parks. And the Hollywood connection,”
said Chief Chris O’Quinn, who leads the California Highway Patrol’s Southern
Division in L.A. County. “This is the place to be.”The deadliest year on record
was 2007, with 18 fatal crashes. After a period with relatively few recorded
deaths, the count grew in recent years, with 15 fatalities in 2015, 11 in 2016
and 12 deaths in 2017, the Times analysis shows.The dead were overwhelmingly
male and young: More than half were 21 or younger, including two children, ages
4 and 8, killed along with their mother. Slightly less than half of the
victims— 47% — were behindOne of the few law enforcement agencies tracking
street racing incidents is the CHP, and it has only been doing so since 2016.
From July 2016 to July 2017, the CHP has recorded nearly 700 racing incidents
in L.A. County. Those races involved roughly 17,000 vehicles and 22,000 people,
according to the CHP data. The data did not include fatalities.The Times
examined street racing deaths since 2000. Its tally of 179 killed is a
conservative estimate, because few law enforcement agencies track street racing
fatalities and the incidents themselves are difficult to classify.Authorities
say many of the races that lead to fatalities are, like the crash that killed
Valentina, spontaneous.Valentina’s mother, Lili Trujillo D’Alessandro, didn’t
know what street racing was before her daughter’s 2013 crash.When she dropped
Valentina off at a friend’s house that day, she remembered, “she looked
amazingly adorable. I can’t even explain the love I felt in that moment.” Her
daughter was wearing combat boots and mismatched socks, her brown hair tucked
under a beanie.
“Maybe something inside of me
told me I was never going to see her again,” Trujillo D’Alessandro, 53, said.
the wheel. The rest were either passengers in the speeding vehicles, spectators
or people simply walking on a sidewalk or driving home.
“When you look at a takeover, you
have a very large concentration of people, out of their vehicles, in a small
area, and again you’ve got that 3,000-pound machine that is semi in control at
best,” said Sgt. Jesse Garcia, one of the Los Angeles Police Department’s top street
racing investigators. “You have the potential of a much higher number of
victims should that vehicle lose control.”
Racers at takeover scenes have
grown more aggressive toward police in recent years as well, according to
O’Quinn, the CHP chief. Officers once were able to scatter racers with a flash
of their cruisers’ lights. Now, some in the car scene fight back, either
blocking a roadway to allow friends to escape or, at times, physically
confronting officers.A fire engine and ambulance responding to a medical
emergency near downtown last year came across a takeover and were “surrounded
by a large group in the hundreds, possibly more,” said Peter Sanders, a
spokesman for the Los Angeles Fire Department. The crew put out a distress call
after some racers leaped into the emergency vehicle, Sanders said.No one was
injured, but another ambulance needed to be dispatched to help the subject of
the original emergency call, who was struggling to breathe.
“That activity placed somebody’s
life in danger,” said Capt. Al Lopez, of the LAPD’s Central Traffic bureau,
whose investigators are searching for suspects in that incident.\Three of those
deaths occurred in the fiery 2016 collision. A suspected street racer doing 100
mph lost control of his Dodge Charger on the 5 Freeway and slammed into a UPS
truck, which went airborne, landed on the center divider and collided with two
other vehicles before exploding. Two passengers in one of the cars — Brian
Lewandowski, 18, and Michelle Littlefield, 19 — were killed, along with the
driver of the UPS truck, Scott Treadway, 52. Four others were injured.
“My every day, my every move with
my wife, was about my daughter,” said Willy Littlefield, Michelle’s father.
“When we wake up, we have to remind ourselves that our daughter is not here,
that this is the new reality.”Dealio Lockhart, 37, was charged with three
counts of murder in connection with the incident. He is still awaiting trial. A
second driver remains at large.A few law enforcement agencies have assigned
officers to the task force. But some agencies say they lack manpower. The CHP
has assigned two-full-time detectives, O’Quinn said.At least a dozen officers
in the LAPD’s Central Bureau investigate street racing, focusing on organized
meet-ups since spontaneous racing is nearly impossible to deter. Efforts to
place a similar unit in the Valley, another racing hot zone, were abandoned for
lack of staff, a street racing investigator said.Los Angeles City Councilman
Mitchell Englander, whose district includes a stretch of the San Fernando
Valley that is infamous for racing, is an outspoken critic of the scene’s
culture and the department’s response. Three years ago, the city council
approved an ordinance he authored that requires the LAPD to incorporate a wide
array of data regarding street racing into the department’s crime tracking
system. After a fiery racing-related crash claimed the lives of four young
people in Northridge last October, LAPD officials admitted during a public
hearing that they still weren’t doing so.
“You can’t solve a problem that
you don’t measure,” Englander said.
Late last year, the LAPD began
tracking fatalities, injuries, crashes and the number of citations related to
races, according to Josh Rubenstein, a department spokesman. The information
was added to the department’s crime tracking system in January, he said.The
Times’ analysis found that at least 60 people died in crashes related to street
racing in the city of Los Angeles between 2000 and 2017. Only two other cities
in the county — Long Beach and Commerce — saw more than 10 deaths during that
period.Neither the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department nor the Long Beach
Police Department, two of the largest agencies in the region, have officers
assigned to the county task force.County deputies are being trained to
recognize vehicles that have been modified for racing, but, Det. Christine
Ostrander said, “our deputies are just overworked, understaffed.”When Benny
Golbin, 36, didn’t show up to play saxophone for a Steely Dan cover band in
Seal Beach on a Friday night in January 2016, his family knew something was
wrong.Hours later, they got the news: Golbin, a musician and teacher, was dead.
That afternoon, as he was heading between jobs, a silver Chevrolet Cobalt flew
over a median on Crenshaw Boulevard in Hawthorne and landed on his Honda CR-V.
He was killed instantly.Police said at the time that the Cobalt was racing a
red Camaro. The driver of the Cobalt wasn’t seriously injured. The driver of
the Camaro fled and was later arrested.For Golbin’s family, the loss is only
made worse by the outcome of the criminal prosecution in his death. The drivers
of the Cobalt, Alfredo Perez Davila, and the Camaro, Anthony Leon Holley, were
initially charged with murder but ultimately accepted plea deals. Davila
pleaded guilty to gross vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to four years
in prison. Holley pleaded guilty to felony hit-and-run and was sentenced to three
years probation after an emotional and contentious court hearing last July. The
prosecutor declined to comment.Benny Golbin’s wife pleaded with the judge for a
stiffer sentence, saying that she would not call the incident a “car accident.”
“It is a murder,” said Anchesa
Bunyasai.
When Golbin’s mother, Sheri
Kessel, hears a saxophone playing on the radio, she turns it off.“This isn’t
just going out and driving fast and having fun with your friends,” she said.
“People get killed. This is life and death.”
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