Anybody Home?
As he sat down at his computer in the living room, a little after 6 p.m., he heard a “small rumble” followed by a thumping, frightening crash. A careening mini-van, blowing a corner turn from Sepulveda, had slammed into his building. “I thought a wrecking ball was coming through my window,” Mr. Gobbeotold thefrontpageonline.com on Monday morning. A familiar face at Trader Jim’s photo store, Mr. Gobbeo, 53 years old, and a neighbor rent side-by-side apartments behind several storefront businesses in a one-story structure at the southwest corner of Sepulveda and Braddock. A south-bound white late-model Cuest, with two persons inside,tried to turn right onto Braddock. Whirling out of control, the car apparently glanced off the facade of the building, destroying all three front windows of Mr. Gobbeo’s neighbor. Before coming to a merciful, tilted rest, the mini-van knocked a hole in the front wall of the neighbor’s living room and sliced into a post that separates the two apartments. The building recently underwent extensive renovation.
“I am certain my neighbor would have been killed if he had been home,” Mr. Gobbeo said. “His bed is right under the window. He is a night person, and he told me later he would have been sleeping at the time of the accident. That is scary.” Mr. Gobbeo, who lives alone, as does his neighbor, came home from Trader Jim’s popular store on Ssepulveda, anticipating an unruffled evening. “I had fired up my computer, and I was checking my emails,” he said. “At first I heard a terrible sound. I really thought something was going to come through the window. When I opened my front door, all I could see was radiator steam.”
Seeking Assurances
“I was out the door seconds after it happened,” said Mr. Gobbeo, who seems never to have lost his presence of mind. He headed for the front seat of the mini-van where he found a Hispanic man and woman sitting stunned. It was not clear whether the couple was comfortably conversant in English. “When I asked if they were all right,” Mr. Gobbeo said, “they kept saying Si,si.” The driver, according to Mr. Gobbeo, repeatedly told him, “I am sorry, I am sorry.”
Next he pursued the welfare of his neighbor. With the steaming mini-van blocking his view from the front, Mr. Gobbeo said he dashed to the rear of the property. He wanted to peer into his neighbor’s home. Quickly concluding the apartment was empty, the relieved Mr. Gobbeo went back to his home and picked up his favorite video camera. The Culver City Police Dept. arrived a few minutes after a 9-1-1 call, and that was when Mr. Gobbeo’s level of angst began to rise perceptibly. Having established that all persons were safe, Mr. Gobbeo became upset for a new reason. Watching the scene closely, he insisted that the driver told police he did not have a driver’s license. Worried that the driver would get away without a penalty, Mr. Gobbeo was furious that the Police Dept. did not bring any kind of charge against the driver.
Police Offer a Different Perspective
“What apparently happened after the accident was pretty routine,” Police Lt. Dean Williams told thefrontpageonline.com. “Especially since there were no injuries, it would have been normal for the driver not to receive a citation at the scene. A ticket is solely up to the discretion of the officer whether to issue one.” Mr. Williams indicated the police officers who answered the call had not been specifically trained in accident investigation. He said that non-injury accidents have become so common in
As for the driver’s alleged lack of a driver’s license, Mr. Williams said that is not unusual, either. “I would say 30 percent of the people we stop either don’t have a license — maybe never have had one — or the driver doesn’t have his license on his person,” he said.
Postscript
With a sense of consternation, Mr. Gobbeo reported, and recorded on film, the nearly immediate presence of “an ambulance chaser or advisor” who counseled the shocked couple. According to Mr. Gobbeo’s recorded film, the mystery man drove his black car into the driveway beside Mr. Gobbeo’s house. There, he spoke with the presumably dazed couple. Mr. Gobbeo was struck by how quickly the person materialized, and said he was fretting that the driver “might get away” without a penlty. While Mr. Gobbeo worried that he may be forced to relocate while his building is repaired, the couple from the mini-van, he said, headed across the street to Taco Bell. “I am concerned,” the near-victim said, “because I only live a block from work now. What am I going to do? I don’t own a car.”