The train arrived at the North Hollywood station at 4:45 a.m. Monday and I boarded with a handful of other southbound passengers.
It was the same line a security guard took on April 22 after leaving his job at a Tommy’s hamburger restaurant.
It was the last journey of her life, before she suffered an unprovoked stabbing on that train.
His murder, so senseless, random and disturbing, destroyed his family and shook the town. I can’t explain exactly why I felt the need to retrace his steps. Maybe it was just an attempt to get to know her better.
The doors closed with a whisper. The train has left the station. Next stop: Universal/Studio City.
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California is about to be hit by a wave of population aging, and Steve Lopez is riding that wave. Her column focuses on the blessings and burdens of aging — and how some people question the stigma associated with older adults.
Her name was Mirna Soza Arauz. Age — 67 years old. Mother of three children and seven grandchildren. Although most of us didn’t know her, as the details of her life emerged, she became recognizable.
Soza Arauz was an immigrant with a goal and she pursued it in Los Angeles. She was one of tens of thousands of front-line workers who toil every day in low-paying jobs in a region with high rents, trying to climb higher and higher ladders.
The heart of the city could not beat without them.
She was saving for a planned return to Nicaragua sometime next year, a family member told me. That’s why, in a place built for cars, Soza Arauz took the bus and the train, even when it became risky to do so. .
Recently, two stabbings on buses made headlines within 24 hours, one involving a driver and the other a 70-year-old passenger.
Mirna Soza Arauz was saving for a planned return to Nicaragua next year.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
“I won’t ride our public transportation system by myself. I’m scared,” Los Angeles County Supervisor and Metro board member Kathryn Barger said last week as Metro declared a security emergency after Soza of Arauz murder and called for stronger security measures, including the use of facial recognition technology.
But many people don’t have other transportation options, and the region can’t function without them.
So what should they do with their fear?
When people cannot go to work, school and daily business without fear, when we distrust those around us and the most vulnerable among us are in greatest peril, these failures are our chess.
We can make public transportation safer, but we would be better off creating a society in which buses and trains do not become mobile shelters of last resort for the homeless, the mentally ill, and drug addicts.
Arauz Soza “was stabbed without provocation by a man who grabbed the bag she was holding,” according to LA Dist. Atty. Georges Gascon. Her accused killer has a criminal record that includes a 2019 attack on a fellow Metro train passenger. He pleaded no contest and under the terms of probation he was ordered to stay away from subway trains, but how could such an order be enforced?
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On Monday, before boarding the train at the North Hollywood station, I went to Tommy’s in North Hills, thinking all the while about the last hours of Soza Arauz’s life, about the inconveniences of his nightly journey to South Los Angeles. Angeles, where she and her son lived together.
His Tommy’s Original is across the street from the Budweiser factory on Roscoe Boulevard. I arrived shortly before 4 a.m. and already a new security guard, Soza Arauz’s replacement, was at work. He was monitoring the parking lot, which sits next to a cluttered lot that faces a vacant, graffiti-tagged building.
Mirna Soza Arauz was a mother of three and grandmother of seven.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
Armando Rubio, 56, told me he didn’t know Soza Arauz, but he knew of his fate. He said he was assaulted several years ago while working as a security guard at a South Los Angeles motel.
“I was in a coma,” Rubio said, lifting his chin and pointing to his lower teeth. “They’re implants.”
Tommy’s doesn’t open until 6 a.m., but the drive-thru is open all night. I ordered a coffee and the clerk at the window told me that Soza Arauz usually took the 152 bus to the stop across the street at Roscoe and Haskell Avenue. The manager, José Murillo, said he didn’t know much about Soza Arauz. She showed up, did her job, went home and came back again and again.
“It’s so sad,” he said.
I followed the 152 in my car through the darkness heading east for several miles along Roscoe, gathering its cargo of early risers on their way to their posts, doing the work that keeps the town alive. Men, women, young, old, almost all people of color. The bus drove south to Lankershim and stopped at the North Hollywood subway station.
I parked, crossed a dark street, and went about my business while observing everything around me. A young man stood and stared, for no obvious reason, at the parking lot near the station. I hated feeling a little nervous, thinking about what could go wrong instead of everything that was going right in the rush of the morning. We lose a part of our humanity when suspicion creeps into our being.
I wondered about Soza Arauz – almost my age – with no choice but to be vulnerable, in the dark, alone.
I took an escalator to the platform, where passengers were already waiting for the next train. When it arrived, I got on board and a man pushed a bicycle onto the same car. I sat near a middle-aged man and tried to strike up a conversation, but he kept to himself.
Among the many people in our car, two or three appeared to be homeless. One of them got up and walked towards another car. Another, a young woman, seemed anxious. She turned around abruptly in her seat, shouted something and slammed her hand violently against the back of a man’s seat in front of me.
He didn’t look up from his phone. A woman near us avoided eye contact.
It’s a five-minute drive from the Universal/Studio City station. Somewhere along that stretch, police say, Soza Arauz was attacked.
She was a security guard, but unarmed, tired and defenseless.
What could she possibly have on her that was worth stealing?
“She was… that hard-working citizen who strives to put food on the table, who is the backbone of a family – who has family in her homeland waiting for her to return,” he said. said Juan Castillo, the son-in-law of Mirna Soza Arauz.
(Dania Maxwell/Los Angeles Times)
The train has stopped. I walked up to the platform and noticed that some flowers had been placed on a bench.
It was here, the place where Soza Arauz had stumbled out of the car as her attacker fled.
Someone had stuck a photo of her on the bench. Two other photos were taped to a nearby column and someone had written “descanse en paz» (rest in peace) next to a heart. Soza Arauz had reddish brown hair. She wore earrings, a bracelet, a slight smile and a look of contentment.
Andres Rios was waiting to board a train to his job downtown as a hotel cleaner. He knew about the murder and told me he was a little nervous as a regular rider. There is not enough security in place, he said.
Two private security guards in yellow vests roamed the platform, and I asked one of them if he was on duty the day Soza Arauz was attacked. Alex Salvador, 24, said he was one of the speakers. He said he held her hand and encouraged her to try to hang on as she lay bleeding on the floor.
“I was talking to him,” he said. Soza Arauz was still conscious, but “she couldn’t speak.”
Minutes later, she was rushed to Cedars-Sinai, where she died.
In recent days, family members have been planning the funeral, planning a service in Los Angeles and another in Nicaragua. I spoke and texted Juan Castillo, his son-in-law, who lives in Managua, Nicaragua. He said Soza Arauz’s body would be returned home and an influx of donations to a GoFundMe page was greatly appreciated.
“She was… that hard-working citizen who strives to put food on the table, who is the backbone of a family – who has family in her homeland waiting for her to return.” , Castillo said.
He told me that Soza Arauz knew about the safety risks on public transportation, but didn’t think she, as an elderly woman, would be targeted.
“She was helping the homeless and she would have helped this guy. If he needed food or clothes or anything, she would have happily helped him,” Castillo said.
The killer didn’t “destroy a single life.” He destroyed the lives of an entire family and extended family.
He destroyed much more than that, and the city should mourn the loss.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
California Daily Newspapers
