By PAUL ANDERSON
The father of a 12-year-old boy told jurors Wednesday that he was jumping up and down and waving his arms while shouting to get the attention of a driver in a U-Haul pickup truck barreling down on his son in Costa Mesa before it slammed into the child, killing him.
Richard David Lavalle, 64, of Long Beach, is charged with second-degree murder in the Dec. 6, 2020, fatal collision with Noel Bascon at Junipero and Arlington drives.
During testimony in a Santa Ana courtroom, Glen Bascon said he and his son went out for a bike ride about 5 p.m. that day but soon realized it was getting too dark, so he decided to return back home. He said he “triple checked” his son’s reflectors and lights on his bike before they left and kept to the sidewalk when they could because it was safer, he testified.
Bascon said he was nearly across the street in the crosswalk when he noticed the truck Lavalle was driving “coming fast.”
“This guy came so fast I was shocked,” he testified. “I started shouting ‘Hey!’”
Bascon estimated Lavalle was going between 40 and 50 mph.
“I was screaming to make him stop,” the tearful Bascon testified.
After he “heard a loud bang,” he frantically looked around for Noel but couldn’t see him.
“That’s why I was so scared,” Bascon said.
After the collision, “I heard slamming on the brakes,” he said.
Lavalle got out of the truck and apparently “didn’t realize what he hit,” Bascon said.
“I said, ‘What the heck did you do? Why didn’t you stop?’” Bascon testified.
Bascon looked under the truck and saw the bike scrunched under it, but his son was not there.
“The truck swallowed the bike,” Bascon said.
Ultimately he found his son and estimated he may have been catapulted about 120 feet away.
“He was thrown out by the strong impact of the truck into the middle of the street,” Bascon said.
Bascon saw that his son’s eyes were closed, and he was unresponsive, so he called for help dialing 911 from witnesses at the skate park there.
“I saw blood coming from his mouth,” Bascon said.
“There happened to be a nurse who worked at a hospital at the skate park,” Bascon said. “He tried to do CPR.”
Former Costa Mesa Police Department Officer Chasen Gaunt, who now works for the Manhattan Beach force, testified that he joined the nurse in attempts to revive the boy until paramedics arrived to take over.
Bascon said he asked Lavalle, “Why didn’t you stop? There’s a very visible stop sign there.”
When Bascon got to the hospital with his wife and daughter, they were given the bad news about his son.
“I was told something you don’t want to hear from any medical staff — sorry, we did everything we could,” Bascon said.
“My wife just collapsed, and I had to hold her,” Bascon said.
Bascon and his son would ride their bikes daily, and Noel would wear a bike helmet and elbow and knee pads.
Senior Deputy District Attorney Casey Cunningham said in court paper that investigators found drugs in the pickup truck. A blood draw about 11:05 p.m. that evening found the defendant had 115 nanograms of methamphetamine in his system.
Lavalle was convicted in 2013 of driving under the influence in San Diego County, triggering an upgraded charge from manslaughter to murder.
Lavalle’s attorney, Jennifer Ryan of the Orange County Public Defender’s Office, said her client “felt awful” when the collision occurred. The defendant’s wife, who was in the passenger’s seat of the truck, told police the methamphetamine police found belonged to her, Ryan said.
Lavalle was “cooperative with law enforcement at the scene every step of the way,” Ryan said.
In a field sobriety test done at the scene nearly an hour after the collision, Officer Eric Molina “formed the opinion Mr. Lavalle was not impaired for the purposes of driving,” Ryan said.
Ryan said experts will testify that ingesting drugs doesn’t always immediately impair someone to drive.
Lavalle told officers he had been working the whole day up on a ladder and had a bad back and hip to explain some of his difficulty standing on one leg and balancing as well as other field sobriety tests.
Ryan said Molina could not find a report he wrote about the tests until this past August.
Another officer had the defendant do more field sobriety tests after he had been sitting “on a cold curb” for an hour, Ryan said.
Ryan said the amount of methamphetamine found was too low to quantify by the Orange County Crime Lab.
“This is a terrible tragedy. It was a horrible accident,” Ryan said. This is not a murder.”
Lavalle is potentially a third-strike defendant because he was convicted in August 2009 of armed bank robbery in federal court and sentenced in April 2010 to 35 months in federal prison, according to court records. He was returned to prison for another year when he violated terms of supervised release in 2013.
Lavalle was also convicted of robbery in Los Angeles County in June 2018, court records show.