Why VTA silence on the death of retiree?
The four-minute-plus Facebook video last December was one of the standard takes at a retirement party. The retiree was a trim man in a dark baseball hat with an understated way of talking as he twirled his beer glass. His buddies provided most of the sound.
“How do you feel, Benny?” asked one of them. “Grateful,” he said. Then, moving closer to the camera, he said, “Thank you for VTA. They were very generous.”
When someone demanded to know the plans of the 60-year-old retiree after nearly 38 years with the agency, he said, “I’ll be doing the Turkey Trot every year from now on.”
In that, Benny L. Cheung, light-rail dispatcher, Milpitas resident and fan of DJ Pollyfonika, was tragically wrong. Cheung was killed last Thursday evening at First Street and Hawthorne Way in San Jose, in an accident that apparently involved a Valley Transportation Authority bus.
All that was sad and savagely ironic. But for four and a half days, the truth of the incident was masked from the public. San Jose cops weren’t saying anything. VTA wasn’t saying anything. Until Tuesday
morning, the case was a “whodunit” to the public, a possible hit-and-run.
It wasn’t until an internal VTA memo to employees was leaked to the Mercury News that the real who and what of this case emerged.
VTA’s director of system safety and security, Rufus Frances, said in that Monday memo that “preliminary evidence in the ongoing investigation indicates Mr. Cheung had just deboarded the VTA bus involved in this tragic accident.”
Put another way, it looks like the bus ran over him.
So the VTA, whose new motto is “Solutions that Move You,” apparently claimed the life of one of its own, a man who had given them nearly four decades of service.
Yet no one in authority really thought that was worth noting publicly. Sure, send a memo to employees.
People liked Benny. Wouldn’t want him forgotten. But tell the public? God forbid. This is getting to be a habit with the VTA.
Nearly a year ago, when one of its buses ran over a 72-year-old man named Ron Thompson in south San Jose, the agency initially insisted that it had evidence the bus was not responsible.
On Cheung’s death, a spokeswoman for VTA, Stacey Hendler Ross, told me, “We knew that a bus may have been involved. But we didn’t know exactly what happened.” Even then, she said, it wasn’t the VTA’s role to release information in an ongoing police investigation.
San Jose police Chief Eddie Garcia said investigators passed on updating the case because they were not absolutely certain what they had.
The call came in as a hitand-run, he said, and police did not focus on the bus until they recovered evidence from its wheel well.
“We have a good idea, we have a good direction, we feel confident,” he told me. “But for us to say 100 percent that it was the bus would be tough.”
Incidentally, the chief declined to describe the wheel-well evidence. When I asked whether the driver was aware that the bus had run over Cheung, Garcia did not answer directly.
“If this bus did run the victim over, we have to investigate that,” he said. “And we have to go step by step.”
The bus driver was taken off duty on the night of the accident. That driver is now on leave pending the outcome of required drug screening tests.
You can appreciate the chief’s caution: Investigations like this are rarely easy. And cops should be careful not to say something that later is shown to be untrue.
But particularly once the VTA has released a memo on the case to its staff, the same information should be shared publicly.
What’s missing in this story is an understanding of who pays the freight in this situation.
Who pays the salaries of the VTA driver and its public relations people? The public. Who pays for the buses? The public. Who pays the cops? The public. Who will pay the death settlement, if there is one? The public.
You’d think that same public deserves an idea of what happened.
Declining to be open about Benny Cheung’s death raises the specter of a cover-up — or the supposition that the VTA doesn’t want to hurt ridership. That might be unfair. But what’s clear is that the cops and VTA should have moved themselves to find a better solution.
“We have a good idea, we have a good direction, we feel confident. But for us to say 100 percent that it was the bus would be tough.” — Eddie Garcia, San Jose police chief