"I was holding him, and I told him, 'Papa, you're going to die. I said a prayer for him — and that was it."
When paramedics arrived, Jacko says, Figueras pulled out his card. "He acted like he was in charge of the fire department," he says "He was walking around like the foreman at a building site. He didn't give a fuck. I was so pissed. I knew it was all wrong."
PHOTO BY TED SOQUI
Jacko, Gary Woodford's best friend, still sobs when he recalls the crash.
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Figueras referred questions to Alarcon's chief of staff, Becca Doten.
Normally, LAPD would have issued a press release detailing the incident — a city official driving a city car involved in a fatal crash — says Lt. Andy Neiman, who's in charge of LAPD media relations. "We don't always release the name of the driver, but if it's a city vehicle involved, we'd typically admit that," he says. "That's not something we need to keep from the public."
But Neiman and his boss, Cmdr. Andrew Smith, were out of the loop. "I'm really surprised I didn't hear about it," Neiman says. "You'd think people would be talking about it."
Neiman described Figueras as "very active with LAPD" due to his job as a field deputy for Alarcon. Valley Traffic Division's Minsal, who recognized Figueras at the scene of the fatality — the two have worked together on community projects — insists that his office sent a draft press release to LAPD press headquarters on March 15 at 4:47 a.m., nine hours after the accident. Minsal showed a copy of it to the Weekly.
Neiman can't find that document in the LAPD computer system. He found only an internal alert to LAPD's command staff, which did not mention Figueras.
Minsal's draft press release failed to identify Figueras as a city employee driving a city car. Minsal says Figueras' job at City Hall isn't relevant, asking: "What part of that would have any bearing on the fact a man was killed?"
Susan Woodford has an attorney looking into her brother's death, saying of the ongoing LAPD investigation, "We couldn't imagine why it was taking so long." She says Valley Traffic Det. James Deaton told her he plans to seek a misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter charge against Figueras.
Today, Irene Woodford thinks about how she got word of her son's death, in a call from Jacko. She thought it was a sick prank — after all, another of her sons was permanently disabled after a car hit him in Florida.
When Jacko began to cry, she knew it was true.
Later, she says, an LAPD investigator told her "it was negligence on the part of the driver. He said it was dusk and possibly the lighting wasn't the best. ... I remember my remark, 'My goodness, that's no excuse. You have lights on the car and that's what you should use them for.' "
On March 22, Irene Woodford received a condolence letter from Minsal.
But until she was contacted by the Weekly, one piece of information was consistently left out: that an L.A. city official was the person who struck and killed her son.
*Details have been added to clarify the contents of the Daily News story.
