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The video of a 78-year-old man being tossed in the air after being hit by a car and then left in the street like a discarded food wrapper would have been hideous whoever the victim.
But this was the victim: Angel Arce Torres, known to all as Ponce, the town in Puerto Rico he left in 1966 to come to the United States. Father of six daughters and one son, with a flock of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Dominoes player extraordinaire. Fisherman and Yankees fan. The guy who bought his own garbage can and chained it up to keep the street clean in front of his beloved El Bohio Café, where he swept the sidewalk, the way others tend their rosebushes, with the broom he kept in the alley. A retired forklift operator who picked up cans to earn a few extra dollars for Carmen Rodriguez, who lives next to the cafe. The least anonymous man on Park Street, who, thanks to one sickening video, became an unlikely symbol of the scary anonymity of the modern street.
And however imperfect the metaphor, no one who knows Mr. Torres can get past the identity of the man lying like a rag on Park Street, the gold dome of the Connecticut Statehouse glimmering on the horizon, as cars drove past and passers-by stopped and stared or walked along. “Everyone knows Ponce and everyone loves Ponce,” said Marisa Estrada, who tends bar at El Bohio. “He’s the one who’s always doing something for someone else, so how could anyone have done this to him?”
Mr. Torres, in critical condition and apparently paralyzed, would have been merely the subject of a local crime story if not for two things.
The first is the insatiable appetite for daily video of the Internet and the nightly news. This one came in the form of a police video from May 30 that shows two cars, what looked like a dark Honda chasing a tan Toyota. Traveling on the wrong side of the street, the first just misses Mr. Torres, who had just bought milk at the corner store. The second hits him, sending him flying over the windshield. Both cars speed off. As Mr. Torres lies on the pavement, nine cars go past without stopping, people walk by or stop and look, seemingly without doing anything to stop traffic or comfort him, until a police cruiser on its way to another call drives up.
The second is a simmering concern over crime in Hartford, heightened by another hideous case the same week, in which a former deputy mayor, Nicholas R. Carbone, was beaten and robbed and now faces brain surgery. Combined with some impassioned language by Police Chief Daryl Roberts (“At the end of the day we’ve got to look at ourselves and understand that our moral values have now changed. We have no regard for each other”), you had not just a sickening scene but also a moment to take stock, for those who live in Hartford and those who do not.
On Friday, people were still trying to make sense of what had happened. Some, like David Myers, 29 and unemployed, who was on Park Street where Mr. Torres was hit, said the metaphor was simpler than the reality. Rather than being indifferent, four people did telephone 911, he and others said. It happened so fast that many did not quite know what to do. (The police arrived in just over a minute.) People knew that the worst thing they could do would be to try to move an accident victim.
“I don’t want to get too political,” Mr. Myers said, “but I’d just say a lot of things go on in society on a daily basis that are definitely inhumane, and no one raises an eyebrow. But this, something that happened so fast, you were stunned by it, this is inhumane? We’re not human? We’re subhuman? What does that mean?”
Others tried to put what happened in the context of street sociology. The accident occurred on a frazzled block across from a vacant lot, an area favored by homeless people and, some say, by drug users. One block over, where El Bohio is, where there’s more commerce and a stronger sense of community, people would have reacted faster, would have been more likely to recognize who the victim was and render aid.
But, of course, that man lying on Park Street might have been a homeless person or a drug user, and he might be Ponce with a container of milk, but he was still a human being, said Mr. Torres’s son, Angel Arce. If we can’t all be heroes, any human being, in the most traumatic moment of his life, deserves someone to stop traffic, someone to hold his hand until help arrives, deserves someone who would have responded the way that Ponce almost certainly would have. And, Mr. Arce added, he certainly deserves someone to come forward with information about the drivers, both still unidentified.
And if Mr. Myers has a point on broader societal failings, surely the lesson isn’t to adjust responsibility down, it is to adjust compassion up, as the elderly man lying on the street did.
So if Mr. Arce takes some solace from calls of support and the cards from 100 children at a local elementary school, it’s hard to get past the image of his father alone on the street.
“It makes me angry and it leaves me hurt,” Mr. Arce said. “To think of him there and no one to grab his hand, to offer comfort. He was always there helping everyone in their time of need and in his time, no one was there for him.”
But this was the victim: Angel Arce Torres, known to all as Ponce, the town in Puerto Rico he left in 1966 to come to the United States. Father of six daughters and one son, with a flock of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Dominoes player extraordinaire. Fisherman and Yankees fan. The guy who bought his own garbage can and chained it up to keep the street clean in front of his beloved El Bohio Café, where he swept the sidewalk, the way others tend their rosebushes, with the broom he kept in the alley. A retired forklift operator who picked up cans to earn a few extra dollars for Carmen Rodriguez, who lives next to the cafe. The least anonymous man on Park Street, who, thanks to one sickening video, became an unlikely symbol of the scary anonymity of the modern street.
And however imperfect the metaphor, no one who knows Mr. Torres can get past the identity of the man lying like a rag on Park Street, the gold dome of the Connecticut Statehouse glimmering on the horizon, as cars drove past and passers-by stopped and stared or walked along. “Everyone knows Ponce and everyone loves Ponce,” said Marisa Estrada, who tends bar at El Bohio. “He’s the one who’s always doing something for someone else, so how could anyone have done this to him?”
Mr. Torres, in critical condition and apparently paralyzed, would have been merely the subject of a local crime story if not for two things.
The first is the insatiable appetite for daily video of the Internet and the nightly news. This one came in the form of a police video from May 30 that shows two cars, what looked like a dark Honda chasing a tan Toyota. Traveling on the wrong side of the street, the first just misses Mr. Torres, who had just bought milk at the corner store. The second hits him, sending him flying over the windshield. Both cars speed off. As Mr. Torres lies on the pavement, nine cars go past without stopping, people walk by or stop and look, seemingly without doing anything to stop traffic or comfort him, until a police cruiser on its way to another call drives up.
The second is a simmering concern over crime in Hartford, heightened by another hideous case the same week, in which a former deputy mayor, Nicholas R. Carbone, was beaten and robbed and now faces brain surgery. Combined with some impassioned language by Police Chief Daryl Roberts (“At the end of the day we’ve got to look at ourselves and understand that our moral values have now changed. We have no regard for each other”), you had not just a sickening scene but also a moment to take stock, for those who live in Hartford and those who do not.
On Friday, people were still trying to make sense of what had happened. Some, like David Myers, 29 and unemployed, who was on Park Street where Mr. Torres was hit, said the metaphor was simpler than the reality. Rather than being indifferent, four people did telephone 911, he and others said. It happened so fast that many did not quite know what to do. (The police arrived in just over a minute.) People knew that the worst thing they could do would be to try to move an accident victim.
“I don’t want to get too political,” Mr. Myers said, “but I’d just say a lot of things go on in society on a daily basis that are definitely inhumane, and no one raises an eyebrow. But this, something that happened so fast, you were stunned by it, this is inhumane? We’re not human? We’re subhuman? What does that mean?”
Others tried to put what happened in the context of street sociology. The accident occurred on a frazzled block across from a vacant lot, an area favored by homeless people and, some say, by drug users. One block over, where El Bohio is, where there’s more commerce and a stronger sense of community, people would have reacted faster, would have been more likely to recognize who the victim was and render aid.
But, of course, that man lying on Park Street might have been a homeless person or a drug user, and he might be Ponce with a container of milk, but he was still a human being, said Mr. Torres’s son, Angel Arce. If we can’t all be heroes, any human being, in the most traumatic moment of his life, deserves someone to stop traffic, someone to hold his hand until help arrives, deserves someone who would have responded the way that Ponce almost certainly would have. And, Mr. Arce added, he certainly deserves someone to come forward with information about the drivers, both still unidentified.
And if Mr. Myers has a point on broader societal failings, surely the lesson isn’t to adjust responsibility down, it is to adjust compassion up, as the elderly man lying on the street did.
So if Mr. Arce takes some solace from calls of support and the cards from 100 children at a local elementary school, it’s hard to get past the image of his father alone on the street.
“It makes me angry and it leaves me hurt,” Mr. Arce said. “To think of him there and no one to grab his hand, to offer comfort. He was always there helping everyone in their time of need and in his time, no one was there for him.”
I still can't figure out why no one bothered to even try and help the man even after watching the video.
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