In hit-and-runs, justice is not always served
40% of such fatalities in San Jose from 2014-2018 remain unsolved
SAN JOSE >> Leticia Martinez thinks about her husband, Jose Luis Moreno Barcenas, all the time, especially when her 8-year-old daughter, Kayla, asks where her father is.
Barcenas died on the night of Dec. 15, 2015, when he was on his way to pick up tacos for his wife. As he passed the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds on Tully Road, a white Ford F-250 pickup rear-ended his motorcycle, pitching him onto the roadway. The driver sped off. Almost four years later, he still has not been located.
“We’re here at home, waiting for him, and he’s never going to come back,” said Martinez, 34. “And the person who did it is still out there.”
Barcenas’ death was one of eight hitand-run fatalities in San Jose in 2015 and one of two in which the driver was never found.
Nationally, hit-and-run deaths have been on the rise over the past decade, increasing by about 7% each year from 2009 to 2016, before leveling off in 2017, when there were
1,978 such deaths, accounting for 5.3% of all traffic fatalities that year, said Brian Tefft, a senior researcher at the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety in Washington, D.C.
In California, too, the numbers have gone up, peaking in 2016, when 369 people died in hit-and-runs, the highest total in 25 years.
But law enforcement experts say the perpetrators in hit-and-run cases, which typically receive less publicity than murders and other violent crimes, are often never identified, much less brought to justice.
Tefft said it is not uncommon for as many as half of hit-and-run fatalities to go unsolved.
It’s not for lack of effort. According to Sgt. John Carr, supervisor of the traffic investigations unit at the San Jose Police Department, detectives examine every hitand-run crash reported in the city — more than 50 a week — and those involving serious injury or death receive exhaustive attention.
Sometimes it pays off, as in the case of Robert Lavin, a 62-year-old bicyclist who was struck by a car July 5 and later died from injuries inflicted by the crash.
But Carr said fatal hitand-run cases typically lack eyewitness accounts, either because no one was around when the collision occurred or because the witnesses do not come forward.
When her husband was killed, Martinez said, “I feel like somebody saw something. I just don’t know why they wouldn’t come out and say it.”
‘He just ran’
It was the Friday after the Fourth of July, and in the early afternoon, Lavin, a retired tech worker, set out for his daily bike ride. But a few minutes later, barely a mile from his home in south Willow Glen, a white Ford Focus struck his bike, leaving him with injuries that proved fatal.
The driver of the Ford did not stop after the impact. Residents who heard the crash rushed to Lavin’s side. Their eyewitness accounts, combined with footage from nearby home-security cameras, gave Carr’s investigators a lead. That night, Anthony Trusso, 35, of San Jose was arrested and on Tuesday was charged with vehicular manslaughter and hit-and-run.
Lavin’s wife, Nani, said she began worrying when her husband did not come home as expected. She tried to check where his phone signal put him on her iPhone app, but the signal, she said, didn’t move.
“I grabbed my keys,” Nani Lavin said, and went where the app directed her. When she arrived at Curtner Avenue and Briarwood Drive, she saw police cruisers and crime scene tape.
“He told me it was a short ride,” Lavin, 63, said later, sitting in the backyard of her home and pointing to a lounge chair shaded by an awning. “He had plans to lay here and read his book.”
The behavior of the driver of the car that killed her husband bewilders her.
“He just ran,” she said. “Other people ran out of their houses to help, and he ran away.”
An increasing trend
In the Bay Area, hit-andrun deaths make up a significant portion of all traffic fatalities. In San Francisco, for example, 30% of the city’s 23 traffic deaths last year were hit-and runs. In San Jose, 17% of the 52 roadway fatalities in 2018 were cases in which drivers left the scene.
Tefft, of the AAA foundation, noted that the 369 fatal hit-and-runs in California in 2016 accounted for 9.6% of total traffic deaths that year, the highest percentage since the federal government began keeping hit-and-run statistics in 1975.
Yet the number of unsolved hit-and-runs also is significant. According to figures provided by the San Jose police, of the 42 fatal hit-and-runs in the city from 2014 to 2018, a driver was identified in 25 cases, leaving 17 in which the perpetrator was never found. In 14 of the deaths, criminal charges were filed.
Arrests can be elusive because detectives are often left with the remnants of a crash — fuzzy security video, broken glass, maybe a bumper — and have to work backward, without the possibility of finding a driver’s DNA, threads transferred from an item of clothing or other forensic evidence they might collect in a typical homicide investigation.
Cases like that of Barcenas, Carr said, linger in his mind.
“Those ones frustrate us the most,” he said.
2019 more of same
This year has so far been no different in terms of statistics. In San Jose, there have been five fatal hit-andruns since Jan. 1. But only Lavin’s case and one other have led to an arrest.
On Jan. 24, Margaret “Peggy” Urueta, 57, was hit and killed by a vehicle a few blocks east of City Hall. Despite grainy video of a full-sized white van, and a description given to police of damage to its right front end, hood and headlight, the crime remains unsolved.
On Jan. 28, Robinder Bhurji was fatally struck at Almaden Expressway and Camden Avenue by a driver who initially stopped but then fled, according to police. Bhurji, left out in the roadway, was soon hit by several more cars. The suspect remains at large.
Carr said the investigative wins for him and his unit have typically come from witnesses like those who rushed to help Lavin, giving his wife some comfort that her husband was not alone in his final moments, she said, and later helping to identify his suspected killer.
In a notorious case from 2016, for example, Craig Anthony Allen, drunk and speeding at 91 mph on Camden Avenue near Hicks Road, slammed his Ford Focus into a Honda Civic carrying Christopher Durbin, 59, and Sandra Morse, 57, killing the Los Gatos couple.
Carr and Deputy District Attorney Michael Gilman said a good Samaritan who came forward helped secure Allen’s conviction this April of a “Watson murder,” a charge reserved for offenders who have previous DUI convictions.
In a hit-and-run case in November, motorists who witnessed a speeding truck hit and kill a woman walking along Capitol Expressway used their cars to box in the fleeing vehicle.
Tiniest tip can help
But Carr said the assistance provided by witnesses need not be that dramatic; an anonymous tip will do. He added that sometimes even people who did not witness a crash know more about a hit-and-run than they realize.
“It can be someone who sees their neighbor’s car that looks like it’s been in a wreck,” Carr said. “Or the person is suddenly walking everywhere instead of driving. I’m just asking them to say, ‘Here’s a crumb.’ We’ll take that crumb and run with it.”
Why would drivers leave after seriously injuring someone with their vehicle?
Tefft, the AAA researcher, said National Highway Traffic Safety Administration data suggest that hitand-run drivers tend to be younger men with a history
of crashes or moving violations, who often do not have a valid driver’s license. Alcohol also may be involved.
That tracks with the experience of Jim Dudley, a criminal justice lecturer at San Francisco State University and a retired deputy chief in the San Francisco Police Department.
“It’s human nature,” Dudley said. “People figure if they can get away with something, they will. The risk-reward balance is in their favor. And if they are under the influence of alcohol or drugs, they’re not going to stop. They’re already impaired.”
Dudley said driving away from a collision, making it a hit-and-run, can turn what might have been an unavoidable crash or a tragic mistake into a serious crime.
“An accident is not a criminal act until you run,” he said.
And then it is more than that. For Martinez and her family, the uncertainty caused by the driver who ran away remains a constant source of pain almost four years after her husband’s death.
“It’s just frustrating not knowing,” she said. “I just want to know what happened. Why would they just leave him there?”