Second Son Lost to a Car Crash

LA PALMA — A 16-year-old boy traveling home from a Korean church in Cypress with his mother was killed in a car crash early New Year’s Day in an accident police said was alcohol-related.

Police had some difficulty identifying the boy because he carried as a memento the identification of his dead brother, killed last February in a car accident, said La Palma Sgt. Jim Thomas.

“The sergeant who made notification [to the family] said it was the hardest thing he ever had to do,” Thomas said.

The 1 a.m. accident occurred at Moody Street and Crescent Avenue when a speeding pickup truck ran a red light and broadsided a Honda driven by 43-year-old Soo Kyuen Lin, of Cerritos, the boy’s mother, police said.

The boy, in the passenger seat, was pronounced dead at the scene by an off-duty Los Angeles firefighter who stopped to help, said Thomas, who also was at the scene of the crash. Lin, who was moaning but unable to answer questions, was taken to UCI Medical Center in Orange where she was listed in critical condition. A Korean Bible lay open in the car’s back seat.

Thomas said hospital officials told him Lin is expected to live but will likely be unconscious for some time. Officials did not release her son’s name.

A Korean chaplain from the La Palma Police Department accompanied a sergeant to the Lin home in Cerritos early Wednesday to notify the father of his second son’s death and clear up the identification problem, Thomas said.

The father works at the Cypress church as a conductor of the choir, but he was not at church with his wife and son.

In a bizarre twist, the accident occurred in front of the La Palma Police Department’s only Korean officer, who had stopped at the light on his way to a medical call.

“He was waiting for the victim’s vehicle to clear” the intersection, said Thomas, who arrived at the scene just minutes later. “The truck went flying by him and slammed into them.”

Preliminary tests showed the blood-alcohol level of Patrick Ruzzamenti, the driver of the truck, “to be more than three times the legal limit” of 0.08%, said La Palma Police Sgt. Mark Yokoyama.

Ruzzamenti, 49, of Buena Park, was listed in serious condition at Long Beach Memorial Medical Center, Yokoyama said. He is also in police custody on suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol, he said.

According to Thomas, Ruzzamenti had been drinking at the home of friends in Buena Park. He got into an argument at the home and “he had left upset,” Thomas said. Ruzzamenti, whose truck flipped from the impact, had no identification on him. Police identified him through fingerprints taken during a prior arrest.

Records show that two misdemeanor cases were filed last October against Ruzzamenti in Los Angeles County Municipal Court in Downey, for being under the influence of alcohol or drugs in public and for failing to appear in court.