February 18
To die on one’s 50th birthday has to be some complete circle, even though the death was not natural, but by manslaughter and the weapon being the other driver’s truck that was drifting between the two lanes on Topanga Canyon Boulevard that night. My memory was only waiting for my dad to come home to watch “Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.” We always watched that show together, which came on at 11 PM, Monday through Friday. When he didn’t show up around 11, I remember hearing a siren coming from the direction of the highway because usually, it was deadly silent in the canyon.
As he was driving towards the home that evening, around the sharp corner on Topanga Canyon Blvd, he came upon a truck all of a sudden that was slowly moving between the two lanes without its headlights on. My dad hit the truck directly, which didn’t cause any physical harm to the other driver but left my father unconscious and dying. The truck driver left his vehicle to run off on foot from the road carnage. Oddly enough, Randy Mantooth, an actor who played a Fireman/Paramedic in the 1970s medical TV series “Emergency!” was driving right behind my father’s car when he smashed into the truck. He went after the other driver and held him at bay till the police came and arrested him. If my dad didn’t hit the truck first, Mantooth would have hit him directly.
After sentencing in a Malibu court, a sheriff and the d.i. in the case pulled me aside outside the courtroom to advise that I should hire someone to take care of this person. The District Attorney in Malibu told me that someone should arrange a beating for the man who killed my dad because something was not right in the criminal case against the defendant.
The story becomes murky during the trial, in which the defendant, Spike, his nickname given to him by his friends, was sentenced to six months in jail but was eventually released within three months. It was brought up that we could sue him for damage, but he transferred his property and income to his father. I think I received terrible legal advice at the time, but I’m not one to look back in bitterness. On the other hand, Spike did have a police record before the ‘accident’ and eventually, after being released from prison, caused another car accident where the other driver became disabled. Spike was generally known in the drug culture that was Topanga because he was the locals' dealer. The whole idyllic Topanga world became something else for me. To this very day, I refuse to go there for any reason.
At the time, the shocking thing was how the d.a. took this case at heart. He was quite indignant, and it was a trial by numbers up to this point. I was called up as a witness, but I never had to testify because the court case kept getting canceled or postponed. I felt like a piece of torn sponge trapped in the gravity pull of the waves hitting the beach. I keep getting notices to appear in court, and then for some mysterious reason, they were consistently postponed. The main reason I was called in was not that I was the victim's son but because my father was killed in my car. Which, by the way, was destroyed by the impact. He borrowed my car because I think the rationale at the time was that his truck was low on gas that evening.
A word of advice is always to hire a good lawyer. The family of the guy who killed my father hired the attorney Robert Shapiro, who soon afterward became famous for handling famous clients, for instance, O.J. Simpson and other sport figure greats. Shapiro is also known to collect signed boxing gloves from famous boxers like Muhammad Ali, who my dad was a huge fan of by coincidence.
I never knew what became of Spike, but Randy Mantooth, and still being an actor, became an advocate for firefighters and paramedics, and even though we never met, I hold him in the highest esteem.
thank you , Tosh. I'm sorry. You're a good person.