Longreads: Crash kills 4 teens, but there are other casualties

James Patterson rolled over his father's Chevrolet Suburban during a desert road trip with friends. Four of his friends were killed in the crash, and police determined he was drunk. Then-Times staff writer J.R. Moehringer spent nearly a year looking at how the 1995 crash altered so many lives.

This is one in a series of L.A. Now posts highlighting examples of memorable storytelling from the archives of the Los Angeles Times. More examples of such journalism can be found at Twitter by searching #longreads and #lalongreads. Do you have a suggestion for a story from The Times archives that we should feature? Send us a note at metrodesk@latimes.com.

Why?

July 28, 1996

He dreams that they are driving again, all eight boys cruising along the unpaved back roads of his mind. He begs them to pull over and let him out, he should get home, but they tell him to shut up and relax, everything will be fine. Reluctant, he sits back and lets himself be chauffeured across the stark landscape of his subconscious, past low-flying clouds of blame and guilt. He lets himself be ferried through the long night, until morning comes and the alarm goes off. Time to go to school. Time to face what happened.

It was 6:20 a.m. July 29, 1995. Starting home from an overnight camping trip with seven friends, he lost control of his father's 1987 Chevrolet Suburban and sent it tumbling across a barren stretch of the Mojave Desert, north of Victorville. Like a Ferris wheel set free of its mooring, the 5,000-pound truck rolled across the desert floor, and with each revolution a friend vanished, a family shattered, a future dissolved.

When everything came to a shuddering stop, he opened his eyes and saw Jono, beautiful Jono, a swimmer with out-to-here shoulders and bottomless brown eyes that made all the girls weak, and he knew right away that Jono was dead. He turned to look in the backseat at John, a snowboarder with a taste for adventure, and he knew at once that John was dead too. He looked out the window and saw the others, scattered in the wake of the truck. Steven, Drake, Pig, Joe, Tony. He jumped out the window and ran to each one, begging them to be alive.