Twist of Fate
By Libby Copeland
washingtonpost.com
Nov 28, 2004
This is where it starts and ends, with the red Jeep, which on the
passenger side looks completely fine, like something you could drive
away, like any other car on the road, except caked in pale mud and
pine needles. From this angle, the car doesn’t seem to belong here,
in a Gaithersburg lot devoted to abandoned vehicles, in a section
where the police put all the cars that have been in fatal crashes.
This is where it starts and ends, with the story of a boy and his
car. He is 16 years old. He is in love with the car, a four-door
sport-utility that his mother shares with him, a privilege he exploits
every chance he gets. He asks his mother if he can tint the windows
and she says no and he does it anyway, and she gets mad and forgives
him. He outfits the Jeep with a new sound system, a subwoofer in
the back so his friends can hear him playing Tupac blocks away.
He hangs his Sunday school graduation tassel and a cross on the
rearview mirror, and he takes the car to school and to work at his
parents’ ice cream shop, where they are proud that he helps out so
often, so ably. Damn if he doesn’t love that car.
The other side of the story is the other side of the car. The
driver’s side. Where everything ended in the early hours of Saturday,
Nov. 13. The tires are blown out, soft and shrinking off the rims,
and the headlight is gone and this side of the hood is dented and
the windshield is veined with cracks, and “BIO-HAZARD” is scrawled
across the car’s side. And on the driver’s seat are more pine needles
and a substance that has pooled, thick and black, into the seams.
And below the seat, near the gas pedal, is a disposable camera and
a white sneaker for the left foot of a boy who was barely 5 feet
7 and had just recently outgrown his father’s size 9 shoes. And on
the back seat is a stick of deodorant and a red cap that says NFL,
covered in pale mud, and a can of Budweiser.
There it is from start to finish, so much of what it means to be
an adolescent boy, the car and the cap and the deodorant and the
beer. Curiosity and callowness and everything that comes with it. Two
16-year-old passengers in this car were hardly injured at all when
the Jeep hit a tree in Potomac, but the driver died. He was Sarkis
George Nazarian Jr., whose name you probably would not have known a
month ago, only now you recognize it from the news and where it sits
in the nexus of tragedy and all those suburban teenagers and crashes
and deaths so young.
His mother says she wants the car back no matter what. If she can
drive it again, she wants it back, and if the car can’t be repaired,
she wants it back. She wants it back because he loved that car. And
because everything ended there.
Learning to Drive
It was a 1997 Grand Cherokee Laredo, bought new, never in an
accident. The boy wanted to drive badly and he got his license as
soon as he could, a month after his 16th birthday. And when Sarkis
Jr., known as Sako, drove with his dad, sometimes it would rain or
snow and he’d offer the wheel to his father, who would tell his son
to keep driving, “because these are the times I want you to drive,
because I am sitting next to you.” And the father, Sarkis George
Nazarian Sr., thought he taught his son well, thought his son was a
conscientious driver.
Now the father blames himself, because this is what fathers do when
they lose a child.
“Now you don’t know how bad I feel,” Nazarian says, sitting in his
large living room in Potomac last Monday night with his wife and
daughter and several of Sako’s friends, who are over at the house a
lot these days. “I feel like I failed.”
Sako’s 16-year-old friend Eliza Kanovsky comforts Nazarian because
that’s what kids do when adults fall apart.
“I really don’t think you failed Sako,” she says.
“Two of them walked away. One of them died instantly,” says
Nazarian, who doesn’t understand the physics of what happened that
night. Nazarian has tried to picture how his son died, piecing together
bits of information from the crash site and from one of the kids who
was in the Jeep with Sako. Nazarian has sat in his own car, a Mercedes
SUV, and twisted from side to side to figure out how his son’s body
moved. At the viewing, he studied his son’s face in the casket —
the bruise on his right cheek, the cut on his right ear. How?
Last weekend, Nazarian’s sister-in-law was in an accident. Her car was
totaled and she was sent to the hospital, but she lived. Why not Sako?
That night, the road was wet. From the beginning, the police said
Sako was driving too fast along a curvy stretch of Travilah Road,
a few miles from his house. Days later, the state medical examiner’s
preliminary report indicated that Sako had alcohol in his system when
he died. Nazarian doesn’t know what to think of that. It could be true.
“I know that he was a good kid,” Nazarian says. “But human beings is
human beings.” He sighs. “I know how much I loved him.”
On Wednesday, police spokeswoman Lucille Baur added something else:
that Sako was not wearing a seat belt when he crashed. She said the
two passengers were.
A Shrinking Family
Sarkis Nazarian Sr. and his wife, Hermine, both of Armenian heritage,
immigrated from Syria decades ago. They had a son, Sako, and daughter,
Tamar, who is 12, in addition to Sarkis’s four sons from a previous
marriage. He used to say he had five sons, but then he had only four,
because just over a year ago one died of cancer at age 32. Now he
says he has three.
He has been a developer, a mortgage banker, an operator of nursing
homes. After he and Hermine got out of the nursing home business,
she wanted to keep busy, so they bought the Wow Cow, an ice cream
shop in Bethesda. Sako was the only person his dad trusted more than
himself to run it.
Sarkis is a small man, about an inch shorter than Sako. He wears a
gray shirt and black pants. Hermine wears all black, including a black
poncho, and she looks across the living room at dozens of photographs
of Sako on posterboard, and cries. There are a few photos from the
last time Hermine saw him, at Dulles Airport on Nov. 8, when she
left for Armenia to be with her sister, who was having triple-bypass
surgery. In those pictures, Sako has grown his hair out, and dark
curls pop from under his Redskins cap. He has his father’s thick
eyebrows and he is experimenting with a goatee.
The news that was relayed to Hermine in Armenia was that Sako had
been in an accident, but that he was okay. Sarkis was afraid that
if Hermine heard the truth, she might have a heart attack. She took
the next flight back and on the layover, in Amsterdam, bought Sako a
bottle of his favorite cologne. Relatives picked her up at the airport,
and she peppered them with questions about her son, and they tried to
change the subject, and when she saw dozens of cars outside her house,
she started screaming.
Since then, there have been many cars in the driveway — relatives, and
friends from Winston Churchill High coming to comfort the Nazarians. On
Monday evening, eight of Sako’s friends. The girls kiss his father
on the cheek. They talk about Sako’s impishness, how he managed to
get friends to believe his far-out tales. They talk about the way he
loved surfing and soccer and backyard football. He did gymnastics,
too, when he was younger.
“He had that routine when he was graduating from Potomac Elementary,
remember?” Nazarian says to his wife. “I got an e-mail from his
coach, Kevin.”
“Kevin,” she says. She stares off toward the far end of the room,
toward the photographs.
The kids talk about how Sako loved his car, how he kept it clean,
how he wanted new rims, how he bragged once about pampering it with
premium gas. They talk about how driving is such a part of their
lives, how it means the power to decide where they want to go and
when. They talk about how the act of driving in volves a physics
they didn’t think about before the accident, involves forces that now
seem mysterious and great, and how cars now seem a little bit like —
well, Nazarian calls them guns.
“I used to, like, race around, didn’t care,” says Trevor Davies,
17. Now, “first thing I say when I get in the car is ‘Seat belts!’ ”
Nazarian talks about waking up in the middle of the night, and about
God’s will. His wife talks about the car, about being able to hear
Sako down the road when the big subwoofer pounded the bass lines of
his rap music.
“He loved his car,” she says.
“Oh, he loved those subs,” one of the girls says.
“I’m going to take it to the cemetery and put the loud music,”
Hermine says.
“Blast the loud subs,” one of the girls says.
“Maybe he’ll say, ‘Hey, Mom, I’m here. I hear you,’ ” Hermine says.
She cries. One of the girls crawls over on her knees and touches the
mother’s shoulder.
Washington Post Staff Writer