Los Angeles Daily News, CA
April 23 2005

Family keeping news of friends’ deaths from crash survivor

By Josh Kleinbaum, Staff Writer

If visitors are wearing black when they drop by Natalie Darmedjian’s
hospital room, her family gives them colorful shirts and jackets to
wear instead.
Nobody wants Darmedjian to know that Araksia Muradian and Ani
Muradyan, her two best friends, are dead.

Muradian, 17, and Muradyan, 16, were killed and Darmedjian was
critically injured Monday night when Muradian’s 2001 Toyota Avalon
slammed into a pole on Coldwater Canyon Avenue. The dead girls were
cousins.

Darmedjian, sitting in the back seat, suffered broken bones in her
legs, hip and chin. And her family doesn’t want the trauma of her
friends’ deaths to hamper recovery at Providence Holy Cross Medical
Center.

“First, we started off by telling her that one has a broken hand and
the other has a broken leg,” said Ahgavni Abdallah, Darmedjian’s
cousin. “Now, we’ve increased the severity. Her mom tells her,
‘They’re not doing too good. We don’t know if they’ll make it.”‘

The three girls, friends since middle school, were on their way home
from their part-time jobs at a telemarketing firm at the time of the
crash, Abdallah said.

Abdallah said Darmedjian told her family the Avalon was involved in a
chase with another car.

“From what Natalie told us, a black car was in front of them with
Armenian (window) flags, and all of them wanted to see who was in
there,” Abdallah said. “It seems like it was a chase. We don’t know
who was provoking who.”

But police say Muradian was speeding in the left-turn lane on
Coldwater Canyon Drive, near Oxnard Street, trying to pass two cars,
when she lost control and slammed into a pole. They estimate she was
going 70 mph in the 35 mph zone.

“All of the witnesses that have been identified provided the same
information,” police Detective T. Wolfe said. “They were driving way
too fast. No other cars were involved, and there was no apparent
reason why they were driving too fast.”

Darmedjian’s family urged others to learn from the tragedy.

“At that age, nobody realizes how important your life is, and how
much driving fast can end that,” Abdallah said. “Speed, it’s the
enemy.”