Neighborhood mourns its favorite UPS driver
It’s easy to read the latest headline about a shooting somewhere in the United States — a movie theater or a school or office — and think, “That’s too bad,” sigh and click on the next story.
But when the day’s mass shooting involves someone you know, someone pivotal in your neighborhood, it’s like a punch in the gut.
So it is for Diamond Heights, the San Francisco neighborhood you won’t find in guidebooks and that doesn’t have a famous bridge or museum or high-rise tower. It’s just a collection of everyday people living in everyday homes who gather every day in the Diamond Heights shopping center to eat doughnuts at Creighton’s Bakery & Cafe, shop at Safeway and push their kids on the swings at George Christopher Playground.
Every lunchtime, Mike Lefiti stopped at Creighton’s, too. The UPS driver always parked his big brown truck in the no-parking zone
outside the bakery and ordered lunch — sometimes a ham-and-cheese croissant, sometimes sausage, cheese and tomato on an English muffin — to eat in his truck.
“And always a large hot chocolate. He’d say, ‘300 degrees hot!’ ” said Moi Ly, who works at Creighton’s. “Every day.”
Every day until Wednesday, when Lefiti and two other UPS drivers were shot and killed at the UPS distribution center on Potrero Hill by another UPS driver, Jimmy Chanh Lam, who then killed himself. Also slain were Benson Louie, who delivered packages in the Sunset, and Wayne Chan, who worked in the Haight and Cole Valley.
I live in Glen Park, but shop at the Diamond Heights Safeway every week and am a regular at Creighton’s. I’d seen the smiling Lefiti, but our beloved UPS guy is Leo Parker, who witnessed Lam shoot Louie execution-style in the head before turning the gun on the others. By a stroke of luck, Parker survived unscathed — in the physical sense, anyway.
On Thursday morning, I saw that a spontaneous memorial of flowers, candles, Warriors gear and notes had sprung up outside Creighton’s. By Monday morning, it had exploded in size, stretching down a brick wall three storefronts long. Neighbors kept coming, adding to the pile and stopping to read the messages to Lefiti, the big man known as Mikey or Big Mike, and described as a gentle giant and the Samoan Saint Nick.
The 46-year-old Hercules resident grew up in Daly City and leaves behind a wife and three children. One message at the memorial says it’s from his daughter and includes the Samoan phrases Ou te alofa ia te ou and tofa soifua. I love you. Goodbye.
In a big, bustling city where many residents live far from their families and hometowns, it’s the daily touchstones like Lefiti who make a neighborhood feel like home. Neighbors said he was that one person who always had a smile and time to chat, and who knew the names of all his customers, their kids and even their dogs.
Brenda Joyce Smith, who has lived in Diamond Heights for 40 years, works as an Avon representative and had packages delivered by Lefiti just about every day.
“I’ve been knowing him at least over 10 years, I’d say. He called me Mama,” Smith said, noting with a twinkle in her eye that she liked seeing Lefiti in his brown shorts. “He had beautiful legs.”
When Smith learned of Lefiti’s death from TV news, she didn’t know what to do. So, like many others, she went to the shopping center. Lefiti’s unofficial parking space was empty.
“Enough is enough — there’s too much violence and tragedy,” Smith said. “I wish they would take all guns away. Then it would be like when I was young. If you had an altercation, you’d fight. That way, nobody is gone forever.”
According to Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to reducing gun violence, an average of 93 Americans are killed by guns every day. Seven of those are children and teenagers. Many of the rest are adults like Lefiti, who were just going about their business and struck down for no clear reason. And yet, nothing changes.
Frankly, if the 2012 slaying of 20 first-graders and six staff workers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., didn’t prompt change in gun control at the national level, the killing of three UPS drivers won’t either. And that knowledge is gutwrenching to many of those in Diamond Heights.
“If someone dies of old age or an accident ... ” said Jose Barrios, a maintenance worker at the shopping center, his voice trailing off. “But if someone gets shot, it’s different. This one is different.”
Barrios said Lefiti was always offering to share his lunch or the Gatorade he bought every day at Walgreens. If he saw Barrios working outside in the wind or rain, he’d bring him a hot coffee. Barrios said he couldn’t help but research what happens to a body when it’s shot.
“What was going on in his mind?” Barrios asked. “What was he feeling in those last few seconds? You get philosophical. Why did it happen?”
John Jordan, a video producer, has the same questions. He moved to Diamond Heights 11 years ago and said Lefiti was the “first real friend” he made. During the tech boom, the neighborhood started gentrifying, but Lefiti never changed.
“What used to be a Toyota Corolla was now a brand-new Tesla,” Jordan said. “He was so not that. He had an appeal to everybody, he really did.”
Jordan bought a house in Pacifica a year ago, but came back to the Diamond Heights shopping center on Thursday to pay his respects. The way Lefiti died, he said, is an outrage.
“It’s never hit home like this before,” Jordan said. “He’s now a national statistic.”
The rest of the country has already moved on. After all, there have been at least 10 mass shootings in the United States since Wednesday’s rocked our city, according to the online Gun Violence Archive. That’s 10 more headlines that prompt a moment of sorrow, but not much else.
But the neighbors of Diamond Heights haven’t moved on and won’t, not for a long time. The memorial keeps growing. The tears keep coming.
“You were part of our neighborhood, a friendly face in this sea of strangers,” reads an anonymous note left among the flowers and candles. “And now you are gone, gone in the cruelest, most heartless way, shot for no reason, as this world descends into more madness every day. All I can say is, I will remember your big smile, your big wave, your big truck. Goodbye, Big Mike.”