Counter-Currents
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Right before the stroke of midnight on Friday, January 12, a young, homeless Hispanic man named Francisco Garcia attempted to cross San Fernando Road in a dilapidated and unincorporated sector of Los Angeles County called Pacoima. It would be the last street he ever tried to cross.
Garcia was first knocked to the ground by a light-colored pickup truck traveling the wrong way in the northbound lanes. The driver did not stop.
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As Garcia squirmed around on the street like a bug that’s only been half-crushed to death, another vehicle, an SUV that was also traveling the wrong way on the northbound lanes, hit him with such force that it knocked him into the southbound lanes. That driver didn’t stop, either.
Within seconds, another SUV — the only one of the three vehicles that was traveling in the right direction — ran over him. Yet again, the driver kept on driving. By the time paramedics arrived, Garcia was already dead.
“It’s so hard, just to know the fact that they just left him there, and he was trying to get up from the floor,” Garcia’s sister Norma told a TV reporter. The fact that she called it “the floor” rather than “the street” suggests that English may not be her first language. Norma said that her brother was homeless, mentally unstable, and had drug problems.
According to the Governors Highway Safety Association, “drivers struck and killed at least 7,508 people walking in 2022.” The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that in 2020, 2,564 pedestrians died in hit-and-run incidents — or about seven every day. Pooling those stats, one could assume that in one of every three deaths where a car killed a pedestrian, the driver fled the scene.
But three drivers in a row hitting the same pedestrian without stopping is an act of savage indifference in triplicate. It’s the grimmest thing I’ve seen all year. Then again, the year is still new. Last summer, I wrote about a 27-year-old Hispanic girl who was sleeping in a public park when a riding mower gobbled her up and spat her out in pieces, but that involved only one driver. This involves three.
You can buy Jim Goad’s The Bomb Inside My Brain here.
There are no good guys in this story. It’s hard to feel too sorry for someone who doesn’t look both ways when they’re illegally crossing a street anywhere in LA County.
About ten million people call LA County home, and an estimated million or so are illegal immigrants. LA County’s population, one of America’s most “diverse,” exceeds that of 40 US states. I called LA home for seven years, and it was the most alienating, anomie-addled place I’ve ever lived. As is the case with Florida, one gets the sense that no one is from LA and everyone fled from somewhere else to get there, giving it a rootless and hollow speed-freak energy you don’t find in some of the country’s staider settlements.
Pacoima (puh-KOY-muh) is one of way too many places in the United States that are “America, but not really.” It is a skid-marked afterthought in LA County’s massive sprawl. Homeless camps perched right next to elementary schools are so stuffed with trash, garbage flows into the streets when it rains. “Unhoused” people wander onto private property and lurch at homeowners with hatchets. It’s where two homeless men can get “gunned down” a mile apart from one another over the same weekend. Redditors describe Pacoima as “a place with a lot of gang activity” where people “raise chickens and roosters in their backyard,” the “streets are dirty, smelly, parks are dangerous, and [there are] house parties every night,” but “as long as you can speak a couple sentences in Spanish, you’re fine.”
I asked a woman I know who lives in the San Fernando Valley about Pacoima, and she wrote back:
Very Mexican & El Salvadoreña & definitely illegal. Not many normal chain brands there, like no Starbucks but brands specifically for immigrants. Tons of street vendors selling food illegally on the street. I have seen them be a front for drug dealers. . . . So Pacoima is a dump basically, full of illegals, signs for birth control & other government signs everywhere, zero care about what their community or homes look like. It is no wonder no one cares there when you get hit & run over but plenty of MoneyGram places to send remittances home. . . . San Fernando Road is two roads that run along the train tracks & it is full of industrial stuff, car-parts places, recycling, etc., with liquor stores on corners & not much else. . . . All the industrial areas are now the campground for homeless people who live in RVs. If that guy was out at 11:45 [PM] walking, he was probably up to no good. . . . I do wonder if this guy was a victim of homeless justice. They live on the streets in tents & beat-up RVs, they have a street captain or boss who runs the street they live on, and they have to pay a tithe or some kind of protection for living there; I do wonder if this guy stole someone’s drugs or something. . . . Sad, but he probably got hit by illegals who fear getting sent back home. It is so common here; some of them will even get out, pull the dying person off the hood of their car, throw them on the ground, & keep driving.
In terms of blunt indifference to human life, the hit-and-run fatality that most reminds me of Francisco Garcia’s triple-thumping is the 2002 murder of Gregory Glenn Biggs, a homeless white man in Fort Worth who was struck by a Chevy Cavalier driven by Chante Jawan Mallard; with that name, identifying her as a “black woman” would be redundant. The force of impact shoved Biggs’s head right through Mallard’s windshield. Accounts differ on how long it took Biggs to bleed to death — some say 12 hours, others say two to three days — but he died inside Mallard’s garage, his head still stuck in the windshield. As he was dying, Mallard would visit him in the garage and apologize, but she did nothing to help him. After Biggs died, Mallard and some friends dumped his corpse in a public park and set fire to part of her car in a botched attempt to conceal evidence. Several months after the gruesome incident, Mallard reportedly laughed while telling friends at a party about how she’d hit “this white man” with her Chevy. She was convicted of murder and sentenced to 50 years in prison.
But that story got national coverage over 20 years ago in an America that didn’t seem like such a terminal case. These days, the US is the world’s only developed country where life expectancy is declining. Suicide rates are peaking. Per-capita opioid deaths are now higher than vodka deaths after the Soviet Union crumbled. American society has reached a state of “hypernormalization,” a term a Berkeley professor coined to describe the late-stage Soviet Empire, where everyone knew things were falling apart and no one had an answer, so they closed their eyes and pretended the slow-motion horror show represented business as usual. Even something as ghastly as three successive drivers treating a human body like an annoying speed bump doesn’t get much press coverage because . . . well . . . that sort of thing is the new normal.
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33 comments
But what about the wide variety of restaurants which you can go to with just a few sentences of Spanish?
We Europeans have all the wonderful food we could ever imagine.
Italian, Portuguese, German, French, Greek, Irish pubs, etc.
I like MY ethnic restaurants! Food that is familiar to ME! I don’t need Bhutanese, Honduran, Indian, or any other food that’s just going to give me heartburn and headaches.
Especially Mexican ! It doesn’t matter what Mexican restaurant my wife drags me to they all taste exactly the same. Even the menus are the same. They must all have the same suppliers. You can throw Chinese food into that basket too. Menus are the same food exactly the same and even the fortune cookies give you the same diatribe.
Excluding the South Pacific, Mexico is the only country with a higher obesity rate than US. Clearly we should limit our intake of their food.
Mexican food is loaded with empty calories (flour, corn, beans, lard, etc)
They also drink a lot of hot chocolate and beer
How can you omit English bakery and English pubs?
Most of the San Fernando Valley now is a dump.
This story is horrifying.
For White people, this deterioration is a bad thing. The country that Whites built is falling apart.
For the 3rd worlders, this is getting back to what they know and are familiar with. As long as the electricity is working most of the time and they have running water/sewer in their homes, many of them will have a better life than what they had back home.
Sounds like a wonderful neighborhood… where you still would need for fork out 700-900K for a 1200-1600 sq ft home.
California has gone from a budget surplus to a 68 billion dollar deficit. Does Governor Gavin Newsom have any brilliant ideas to fix this? It seems his plan is to get the f— out of that mess hoping to fail upwards, angling to be a presidential contender at some point. Wow, great idea to take that success nationally.
He thinks he’s too big to fail!
What’s there to “fix” for Newsome? There’s nothing to suggest this wasn’t the desired outcome for these people.
struck by a Chevy Cavalier driven by Chante Jawan Mallard; with that name, identifying her as a “black woman” would be redundant
That was news to me as I saw a movie adaptation of the murder, Stuck (2007), in which Mena Suvari played the driver. The incident was also used in the Fargo TV series, which had Kirsten Dunst as the villain. And neither was wearing blackface.
I read somewhere that Pacoima is known as the place where the first live rock album was recorded. It was Richie Valens Live at Pacoima Junior High. Either that or Richie Valens Live at Pacoima High. Probably the former, because why would they need a senior high?
Valens … what is that, Eye-talian?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H988-sd-Ls4
Pacoima does hold Chicano cachet and turns out you’re right about the Richie Valens album and they want a pretty penny for it. Check this out, esse. From Fernando Viciconte’s album Pacoima.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aP1YE0LhqEQ
I have the Valens Pacoima LP, but it’s buried in storage. I remember buying it in college at a used record store in the 80s and liking the song where he went “Ooh, my head!” because it sounded like Robert Plant. Both Valens and Plant got that from some black singer, I think. Valens died in the plane crash with Buddy Holly. I never saw the movie, which was really popular, where a Filipino played Valens. What an insult. You mean they couldn’t have got Fernando Valenzuela to do it?
Looks like you’ve got $35 worth of vinyl there and they want $141 for a CD. You can stream it on Amazon, though, and buy MP3’s of it for $10 or so. I love it. Ooh My Head is Little Richard’s Ooh My Soul and that Fernando guy does it, too.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-YjvSAQQZw
Bro, Richie Valens was brown.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ritchie_Valens
Bro, I know he was brown. I meant it was insulting for a Filipino to pretend to be Mexican in a movie. Wouldn’t you feel insulted if, say, you were Irish, and a Greek or Italian actor played a historical Irish role in a popular movie?
Los Lobos did the music for that thing. Probably the only good thing about it.
The way the woman describes the San Fernando Valley/Pacoima area sounds like a lot of big cities in the US. I have a sinking feeling that this hellscape is coming to more and more urban/suburban areas.
LA is worse than most US cities, and you’re right that it is spreading everywhere.
Record number of hit-and-runs where I live in the past year or two.
I’m not pointing los fingers, but there is a huge Hispanic population where I live.
People don’t value things they don’t/wont work for. Illegals have stolen their place in our society and don’t value it at all. Every day I see more and more garbage up and down the main streets of my town, and I know those who threw it there are not my tax paying neighbors.
My mother saw the same thing in Mexico City 40 years ago. She was in a taxi from the airport and the car ahead of them knocked down and ran over a woman crossing the highway. Then her taxi went over the person. No one stopped.
It was interesting reading the inside source about street organization among the un housed
The San Fernando Valley was the origin of the obnoxious “Valley Girl” accent meme as popularized by Frank Zappa’s song in the 80s, a symbol of vapid mindless consumerism that infected American youth who whiled away their teen years hanging out at the Mall.
How fitting that it should transmogrify into a modern hellscape of homeless tent camps where opioid shooting and snorting zombies dwell to menace the few remaining normals left who scurry to work to keep home and hearth and sanity together, all the while mocked by their “elites”.
San Fernando Valley is the global future writ small, but growing like a tumor to a neighborhood near you.
I used to have a book about brown bears (grizzly bears) and it said in the early 1700s the Valley was a paradise for those bears. No people anywhere in the Valley, because the Indians had been wiped out by Euro diseases via the Spanish, or they had been brought to the Spanish missions. The first Spanish cowboys came to the Valley and found grizzlies everywhere and fought them as if they were bulls in its natural amphitheater. That’s what that romantic book said. I stupidly gave it away and can’t check it now.
“hypernormalization,”
Best. Documentary. Ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yS_c2qqA-6Y
If you go a few miles south on that same street you get run over by Armenians.
Amazing story.
Plus, Jim Goad has a great voice. I’d like to do my part to promote Jim’s and CC’s excellent commentary.
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