The Fallen

My general feeling about roadside memorials was perfectly captured by an Onion article several years ago. The headline was “Site of Fatal Auto Accident Tritely Remembered.” Purporting to chronicle the scene of a two-car collision in rural Kansas that had killed three people and critically injured another, it recounted with faux-journalistic solemnity a procession of grieving townspeople who, “with plastic flowers, stuffed animals, and hand-painted signs,” had arrived with an abiding determination to “consecrate the death site in the most trite and hackneyed way possible.”

Perhaps my favorite lines in that piece had come from “off-duty sheriff’s deputy Scott Tierney.” Noting that the one of deceased had been, like Tierney, a family man, the reflective lawman had noted, “It’s sobering to think that everything can disappear like that, in the blink of an eye.” He’d then added that the dead man “must have been quite a guy to warrant that purple horse piñata.”

I do understand and appreciate the fact that grief takes many forms. It’s just difficult for me to fathom why it should take the form of an outsized teddy bear shedding a plastic tear, or a mawkish poem rife with misspellings. I therefore was predisposed to be more bemused than moved when, during a Sunday-morning run about a month ago along a green and sleepy stretch of MacArthur Boulevard near the Carderock naval facility, I emerged from the dark of the Beltway underpass to spot two makeshift blue-and-white crosses across the road to my right. They were three or four feet high, standing side by side just inside the guardrail. While the site was not surrounded by what the Onion article had brutally described as a “heap of embarrassing kitsch,” I did note bouquets of plastic flowers affixed to the crosses and surrounding their bases.

As I continued down the road, I speculated about what might have happened at that place, and when. The guardrail was intact, and the dense vegetation surrounding the site didn’t look at all disturbed. I couldn’t recall having heard of any recent accident along that stretch of road. There had been writing on the crosses, but I couldn’t make out the words from my side of the street.

I passed the site a couple more Sunday mornings, becoming a bit more curious each time. Finally, I resolved to buckle down and do some investigative reporting. It was an exhaustive process that consisted of hopping in my car, parking on the underpass’s shoulder, walking maybe 30 feet to the memorial site, pulling out a pen and a piece of paper, jotting down the names that had been handwritten on the crosses, conducting a Google search and printing out the results. All of that together must’ve taken me 25 minutes, giving me renewed respect for Woodward and Bernstein. I mean, back in the pre-Internet 1970s, piecing together the intricate Watergate puzzle must’ve taken, what, twice that long?

Anyway, I discovered that the memorial didn’t mark a recent crash, but, rather, a one-year anniversary. As I combed through online accounts, the accident’s broad outlines came back to me. It had been a big local story. Around 11 pm on a Tuesday last July, a 33-year-old Bethesda woman who’d gotten sufficiently plastered at her neighborhood bar to imagine her drive home ran through Virginia had almost reached that state when, just north of the American Legion Bridge, she’d rear-ended and forced off the road a truck in which two Springfield, Virginia, men were traveling. The truck had plummeted 60 feet down a ravine, instantly killing the driver, a 39-year-old Honduran immigrant, and his friend, who was 37.

The newspaper accounts I read said little about the passenger, Franklin Manzanares, but contained much information about the driver. Over the course of nearly 20 years in America, Gradys Mendoza had risen from restaurant worker to banquet manager to construction company owner. He had become a citizen. He’d married and had three children. Newspaper articles and letters to the editor of the Washington Post attested to his having been well-loved and admired. In a video clip, a retired Army warrant officer choked up while describing how Mendoza had been like a son to him.

That man, Walt Purkoski, had been one of nearly two dozen Virginians who’d chartered a bus to attend the trial in Maryland this May of the ironically named Kelli Loos. The former meeting organizer had been sentenced to 20 years in jail, with parole eligibility after 20 months because, the judge said, she showed “a huge level or remorse” and dedication to overcoming her alcoholism. (Being responsible for the deaths of two people apparently is literally and figuratively sobering.)

Loos, according to a Washington Post account, had sobbed nonstop in court as tributes to the men she’d killed went on for nearly an hour. Judge Louise Scrivener, despite having sentenced Loss to “the high end of state-recommended guidelines,” paid her the mercy of saying “she’s not a horrible person by any means.” Among the many people in the courtroom who likely had begged to differ were Mendoza’s widow, Maria. She’d written a long letter to the judge in advance of sentencing that had read, in part, “I want you to know that the 7th of July, 2009, destroyed our lives.”

So, that was the backstory to the crosses along MacArthur Boulevard. The truck had landed in a ravine away from the road, which explained why I’d never associated that area with the crash until the makeshift memorials arose to provide my clue. Mystery solved. This was the spot where two men and many more hearts had plummeted into a dark, unyielding hole.

The aesthetist—and, OK, the snob—in me will not mourn the fake flower-bedecked tribute’s eventual disappearance. But if this roadside memorial’s greater purpose is to make death seem a little less vast, the departed a bit less anonymous, the world a touch less indifferent, by my lights it’s done its job. Because I can’t imagine ever again running past the site without thinking about two men on their last ride, a grieving widow, three fatherless kids, a convicted killer with a lifetime of guilt coiled cancer-like in her chest, and a bereaved old Army man living out the rest of his days missing his Honduran son.