Tragic end for oncehomeless veteran
When Corey Friccero served as a public face for Santa Clara County’s Measure A affordable housing bond last November, he was no ordinary pitchman. He had endured hard times after an honorable discharge from the Air Force, sleeping in creek beds and scrabbling for food.
A ruddyfaced man with thinning hair and a neatly trimmed beard, Friccero, 35, never liked the attention on himself. But at the end of the half-minute television ad, he ended with words that echoed his purpose and military past. “Having been where I’ve been, I can’t leave anyone else behind,” he said.
“When I heard him say that, I knew we had someone special we were working with,’’ said Supervisor Cindy Chavez, one of the chief authors of Measure A. “He was an example to every one of us. His refusal to give up saved lives.”
He could not, however, save his own. Something went terribly wrong for Friccero on May 18 on Highway 65 north of Roseville, a flat and fast two-lane road that opened to four lanes nearby. The former Air Force man had moved to the Sacramento area to help his 86-year-old grandmother, whose 1997 Saturn he was driving that night.
According to the California Highway Patrol, Friccero halted the Saturn in the northbound lane just after 11 p.m. He then got out and started walking south in the southbound roadway, where he was hit by a Toyota Camry driven by a 27-year-old man from Chico.
Friccero’s body was thrown into the northbound lane, where he was struck by a Toyota van. He had no chance to survive. A tow truck driver who had stopped to help was hit by a third car and suffered major injuries.
“Nobody really knows why he stopped the car and was on the road,” said Friccero’s mother, Darlene Bright, who emphasizes that her son was not suicidal and that the gas tank in the his car was empty. “It’s a mystery, a tragedy.”
But if Friccero’s exit from life was a mystery, there was no enigma in his legacy. And that was what the Board of Supervisors honored last Tuesday.
Growing up in Sunnyvale and Santa Clara, Friccero was a sensitive and witty young man who did not like school much. In the Air Force, he worked in a C-17 supply squadron, serving in Iraq and Germany and helping during Hurricane Katrina.
Discharged just before the punishing recession of 2008, Friccero had trouble finding jobs and went into a downward spiral, living on the streets. With his mother’s help, he finally got into a program for homeless veterans in Menlo Park.
He eventually got a voucher for housing and got a job as a veterans’ outreach coordinator for Goodwill of Silicon Valley. In an effort to earn more, he left in January and was preparing to take courses in social work at Sacramento’s American River College.
Politics did not define him: Friccero loved to play shinty, a Gaelic version of field hockey. And he was a fine cook, specializing in stews and soups prepared in a crock pot.
On the Mother’s Day before he died, he drove his grandmother down to his mother’s Santa Clara home, preparing a brunch of parmesan-covered salmon on English muffins.
He did not talk much about his Air Force days. But his enduring allegiance was to homeless vets. At a Veterans’ Day parade last November, three days after Measure A passed, Friccero spotted a homeless vet he knew in the crowd. “I’ll bring him in,’’ Friccero announced as he left the officials with whom he was sitting.
“He valued everyone out there who was homeless,” said Nick Jaramillo, who has taken Friccero’s old post as Goodwill’s veterans’ outreach coordinator. “He understood their plight. He wasn’t going to leave you out there as a nobody. You were more important than he was.”