"He Just Mowed Them Down"

A wild driver causes chaos and death on the eve of the Olympics

It is a Friday-night ritual in Westwood Village, an enclave of movie theaters and trendy shops neighboring the sprawling campus of the University of California, Los Angeles. Teen-agers and college students hang about the bars and ice-cream parlors to gawk and hobnob, while lines of moviegoers curl around the corners.

The milling crowd along Westwood Boulevard was particularly thick last Friday night, the eve of the Olympics' opening ceremony. Passersby hoped to catch a glimpse of a few of the 3,400 athletes housed just four blocks north in the Olympic Village.

Shortly before 9 p.m., shouts and screams rang out from the crowd. A red 1979 Buick Regal sedan swerved out of the street and onto the sidewalk. Picking up speed, the auto barreled almost a full block at more than 35 m.p.h. The mad driver scattered people "like tenpins," said Ken Jacobs, an eyewitness. "He just mowed them down." The driver stopped only when he slammed into a bus shelter, crushing his car's front end and sending shattered glass into the street.

Eileen Deutsch, 15, of Queens, N.Y., lay fatally injured; she died in the emergency room. Miraculously, the death toll by Saturday evening was only one. More than 50 other people had been injured, five critically, including a two-year-old baby. Said Fire Inspector Ed Reed: "If someone had not told me what had actually happened, with the debris and number of victims, I would have assumed that a bomb had gone off."

"People were sprawled all over," recalled Susan Mahaffey, 17. "There wasn't much blood, but most of the people were lying very still. Some were unconscious. A couple looked dead." Dozens of shoes, lost in the panicked scramble, were strewn along the block. A baby carriage lay overturned and empty. Blood began to seep along the concrete.

Groans and cries broke the momentary stillness, then sirens, as an armada of 19 rescue vehicles raced to the gory scene. "It was absolute chaos," said Police Officer Ruth Hoffman. "People were running and screaming in every direction. They couldn't find their friends or family." Paramedics treated victims where they fell; plasma bottles were hung from car antennas. Two dozen youthful Guardian Angels, a self-described anti-crime patrol, dressed in T shirts and red berets, helped restore order.

At first, officials feared an Olympics-related terrorist act. But Los Angeles Fire Chief Donald Manning insisted that the Westwood disaster was "not in any way connected with the Games."

No athletes were hurt. The act seemed quite deliberate, however. Witnesses said the driver, Daniel Lee Young, 21, made no effort to turn off the sidewalk; instead, he appeared to gun his engine as his car hit the crowd. He was grinning manically as he stepped, uninjured, from his car and turned himself over to the authorities. Los Angeles Police Chief Daryl Gates told TIME that Young, a convicted burglar on probation, wanted "revenge against the police." He has been charged with murder.