New Year’s Eve, 2025. That means it’s the 30th anniversary of a horrible event that illustrates just how temporary this passage called life really is.
New Year's Eve, 1995. I had traveled from Sacramento, California,
and was visiting my father in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He lived in the Green Acres mobile-home park,
located north of Osuna Road, off of Second Street NW, a street that runs
parallel to the Second Street Drain, an irrigation ditch during the growing
season but empty of water in the winter.
I went out early in the evening (to a short-lived Albuquerque
institution called the Ice House) but returned to my dad’s trailer before eleven
p.m. My dad wanted to retire early, so I
took out the leash and prepared to walk my dog Sparky for the midnight hour.
Sparky and I walked south, beside the dark and empty ditch. About 11:45 p.m., an engine suddenly began thundering
in the distance. A pickup truck inexplicably careened off the street, rolled
out-of-control across an empty no-man's-land, and then plunged into the empty
ditch, at a place almost across from the Newstand (a decades-old Albuquerque institution;
an archive of sorts, but which doesn’t carry anything that might be called news).
Sparky and I ran to see if we could help.
Arriving first at the scene, I scrambled into the dark
ditch. The truck was pointed downward at
about 60 degrees, and canted over to the right.
With difficulty, I climbed onto the vehicle and opened the driver's-side
door, looked inside, and saw - nothing at all. No one appeared to be in the
vehicle. Where did the driver go? What was going on?
I could hear a distinct mechanical gurgling sound, however, that
I attributed to coolant escaping from the broken truck's radiator onto the hot
engine block. I decided to climb out and check the passenger side of the
vehicle. Before I could fully-explore
that side, however, emergency personnel began arriving, so I climbed out of the
ditch and let them go to work.
Later I learned that the driver, who had fallen asleep at
the wheel, had passed halfway through the windshield, fallen backwards, caught
his throat on the broken glass and been slashed from ear to ear. He had then
fallen under the passenger-side glove compartment, which is why I hadn't seen
him when I looked into the dark ruck. The gurgling sound I heard was his last
bloody breath. And from what I understood from the emergency personnel there
was blood EVERYWHERE!
I told the cops what I knew.
Later, I received a call from the cops asking me to talk with the driver’s
family. They were recent immigrants from
Mexico, weren’t cooperative, and didn’t trust what the cops were telling them
about the accident. Surely accidents
like this just don’t happen. Was the driver
chased off the road by gangsters, or maybe by cops? What happened?
I called the family and asked to talk with them. I went to another trailer park (a larger,
more-anonymous park in the North Valley).
I learned the driver was eighteen years’ old, and had been married just
a week. He had had just one beer, given to him by a male relative at work, and
apparently the first and only beer he had ever had IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE. After a hard day at work, one beer was enough
to make him groggy, and a danger to himself and others. His 18-year-old bride/widow got upset during
the conversation and left to cry in the bedroom; I kept talking with her
sister, and the fellow’s father (who looked just like the driver in
photographs). I told them I didn’t see
any other vehicles; no cops or gangsters were involved. Apparently it was just a sad, sad accident. They asked me if there were any last words
from the driver. Unfortunately, there
were none.
The victim was labeled by the local news media as the first
Albuquerque fatality of 1995, but I knew he was the last Albuquerque fatality
of 1994. Not that it mattered. Poor guy;
just tragic.
Tonight, don’t be this guy.
