SAN JOSE — The driver of a stolen car lost control while apparently speeding with another car and crashed into a light pole early Saturday, killing one occupant and seriously injuring two others.
Vladimir Cavadas Vargas, 14, of San Jose, was pronounced dead at the scene of the crash. A relatives said he was a passenger in the car. The names of two other injured passengers, a boy and a girl, were not immediately released.
According to San Jose police Sgt. Heather Randol, about 3:13 a.m. two cars, both with several passengers, were speeding west on Hillsdale Avenue. As they approached Meridian Avenue, the driver of one of the cars lost control of the vehicle and it began to turn sideways. It struck the light pole and ejected three occupants.
Randol said alcohol was a factor in the crash.
“I heard a big bang and walked outside,” said Louis Sterio, who lives on Meridian about 50 yards from the crash.
He saw a man crossing the middle of the street and then “heard a scream I had never heard before. It just shook my bones.”
He said the teen continued to scream, even after police arrived.
San Jose resident Aracely Trujillo, who said her daughter was a passenger in a third car, said that before the crash young people had been drinking in a park. Her daughter warned one of the boys not to drive fast, “but he didn’t listen,” Trujillo said.
The teens, at least some of them Del Mar High students, piled into cars and left the park, Trujillo said. But when those riding with her daughter suddenly didn’t see one of the cars, Trujillo said, they turned around and came across the crash site.
“My daughter smelled gas,” Truijillo said. “She was crying.”
She set off with another friend to find help, but at some point apparently returned to the site and cradled her friend’s body in her arms, according to Trujillo.
“She’s so scared,” the mother added. “She’s so sad.”
The crashed car had been stolen while parked on the street outside a West San Jose condominium complex.
“It was horrible to hear that someone had been killed,” the car owner told this newspaper.
When police knocked on his door shortly after 4 a.m. Saturday, “I didn’t realize it was stolen,” said the owner, who did not want his name published. It was the fourth time that the car, a 1996 Honda Accord, had been stolen, he said.
Just 10 days earlier, he said, he had paid $300 to get the car out of impound after it was stolen for the third time.
A vigil for Vladimir was held early Saturday evening at the Rite-Aid at intersection where the crash occurred.
One of those attending, Matthew Paz, 21, of San Jose, said he was a friend of the dead teen.
Paz described Vladimir as outgoing and intelligent.
“He could have been a mechanical engineer or anything he put his mind to,” Paz said. “He wanted well not only for himself, but for everyone else around him.”
Contact Sharon Noguchi at 408-271-3775. Follow her at Twitter.com/noguchionk12.
