Asmall crowd gathered at the corner of West 46th Avenue and Tejon Street on Friday afternoon. Most of them were related to Juan P. Rodriguez, whose name was stamped in white letters on a new blue sign that also read: “Don’t Drink and Drive.”
The memorial sign went up a couple of days ago, bolted to a pole along Tejon at the edge of a vast parking lot. At the other end of the lot was an empty building once occupied by Victory Outreach church. To the south was a liquor store with a drive-up window doing a brisk late-afternoon business, an irony that did not escape Rodriguez’s son-in-law, Fidel “Butch” Montoya. He shook his head and pointed to the ground below the sign: an empty beer bottle.
It was cold and gray. Someone set up a microphone stand and another man checked on a crate holding white doves, and from across the street a passer-by yelled, “What’s going on over there?” No one answered. He crossed the street. “What’s going on?” he asked Eddie Armijo, a family friend. Armijo hesitated. There was no easy way to explain. “A drunk driver hit a man and he died,” he finally said.
District Attorney Mitch Morrissey arrived, and the ceremony got underway. Steve Siegel, director of the special programs unit of the district attorney’s office, told the family his office had done many of these memorials over the years, but “this one is truly the most unique.”
Montoya stepped up to the microphone and said: “We’re here to remember . . .” He stopped and looked away. Family members wept. “. . . nuestro hermano Juan,” Montoya finished. Our brother Juan.
Juan P. Rodriguez died Dec. 16, 2008. He was 79. He died of an infection, but if it were only an infection, we would not be standing on this corner on a cold day.
“It was right over there,” Rodriguez’s daughter, Lori, told me. She pointed north to the corner. She was 19 years old and driving the car. Her father was sitting in the passenger seat. “I was going east on 46th, and I saw the guy coming. He was coming right at us. There used to be a driveway there, and I tried to pull into it to avoid him, but he turned right into us.”
This was in 1984. Rodriguez was left paralyzed, bound to a wheelchair for the rest of his life. His family would tell you he died a contented man. He was not one for regret or recrimination. He did not curse fate or God. He enjoyed life’s small pleasures. Watering the lawn. Eating menudo. Driving his car. Working out. He never spoke of the accident, never complained about being paralyzed, never wondered about the man who hit him and then skipped out on his court date and disappeared. In that way, Rodriguez not only made a life for himself, but for his family, which followed his lead and forgave.
We are accustomed to thinking of the line between cause and effect as direct, without interruption or detour. We are accustomed to thinking so even when we know this is not always the case. When an infection ravaged Rodriguez and then killed him, his doctors said it would not have progressed as it did were he not paralyzed and he would not have been paralyzed were it not for the accident. “Accident, pneumonia, sepsis,” said the death certificate. For a brief time, the coroner’s office said it intended to list vehicular homicide as cause and manner of death. In the end, it called it an accident.
None of this has been easy for the family. A ghost had been resurrected. For a while, they wondered what happened to the driver, whether he had straightened out his life. For a while, Montoya imagined police knocking on the man’s door only to have it answered by a child, saying, “Daddy, the police are here.”
Do you still wonder? I asked him Friday. No, he said. “We don’t talk about him. We don’t think about him. He slipped into our lives for a few days. Now, he’s gone. We think only about Juan.”
Montoya was Denver’s manager of safety when the district attorney’s office, his office and Mothers Against Drunk Driving started the memorial sign program. That’s another irony that doesn’t escape him.
On Friday, Montoya told his family that all around north Denver were memories of Juan and that this particular sign would always remind them of his lessons: “You don’t hurt other people. You live life in a way that people will respect you.
“Juan,” he said, “we are here to honor you, to remember you, to say we miss you.”
The man with the doves handed a single bird to Juan’s widow, Lupe. He folded her hands over its wings and then opened the crate and released a dozen white birds. She let hers go, watching it join the others. They flew over the parking lot, around and around, white against gray. Then they turned toward their home, blended with the sky and disappeared.
Tina Griego writes Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. Reach her at 303-954-1416 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
