Horse racing reaches out to Lava Man’s groom

DEL MAR -- The sports pages are dominated by heroes and bums. Noe Garcia is neither.

He is a 39-year-old man from Guatemala who has scraped and scrambled all his life to feed his wife and four children in a country where most people speak a language that isn’t his.

Still, he works in the United States on a renewable work visa and owns a house near the racetrack at Hollywood Park. Trainer Doug O’Neill stables most of his horses at Hollywood Park, so work was nearby for Garcia.

Garcia is a thoroughbred horse groom. When a horse races, 1% of the winnings go to the groom. A famous horse named Lava Man, who has won more than $5 million, bought Garcia his house.

The duties of a groom, usually for a weekly salary in the range of $400, include washing and brushing and rubbing down the horse. He puts bandages on fragile ankles, and when he takes them off, he is the first to notice if anything is swollen. He spends long hours of each day, six days a week, talking to the horse, calming him, controlling him with gestures.

Much of Noe Garcia’s work is done with his hands.

Not anymore.

In the early morning hours of July 23, Garcia was driving his Toyota van south on the San Diego Freeway toward the track at Del Mar, where the current Southern California thoroughbred meeting is taking place. Sunday was his day off, so he would go home to Los Angeles after the racing Saturday. It gave him a long day with his family, especially if he left in the wee hours of Monday morning, got to his room in the barns at Del Mar for a quick nap and was up at 4 a.m. to tend to Lava Man and his other horses.

“Just watching him work with Lava Man is something,” said Dennis O’Neill, Doug’s brother and business partner. “It’s like a father-son relationship. Lava Man is not an easy horse to be around, or to get along with. He is tough, has a mind of his own. We have a fake nameplate on his stall at Del Mar because so many people would stop to see him and he wasn’t acting well with it.

“But then you’d see Noe walk into his stall and Lava Man would just straighten up. With everybody else, Lava Man is in charge. Not with Noe. Noe is in charge.”

Garcia had almost made it that night. According to the report of the California Highway Patrol, he was near the Lomas Santa Fe exit, just a few miles north of Via de la Valle, where he would get off and go to the barns.

The report, written by Eric Newberry, Oceanside CHP public affairs officer, and based on the report of on-scene officer Brian Sullivan, said that Garcia was in Lane 3 when a fast-moving car in Lane 2 driven by Humberto Castillo of Oceanside approached from the rear, moved slightly into Garcia’s lane and hit the left rear of his van.

“It’s like what you see on TV, when you are watching one of those long chases we have,” Newberry said. “To stop it, we get up close and then spin the car from behind. That’s what happened.”

Garcia’s van apparently spun, then flipped several times. While the details remain sketchy, even to a still-traumatized Garcia, the most likely scenario is that Garcia’s left arm flapped through his open window while the van was tumbling. Garcia told Leandro Mora, O’Neill’s assistant trainer and the first to visit him later that day in the hospital, that he remembered the vehicle coming to a stop upside down, that he went to unfasten his seat belt and his left hand just wouldn’t do it, so he eventually unsnapped it with his right hand.

The reason his left hand wouldn’t do the job was because his left arm had been torn off, just below the shoulder.

July 23 was Juan Arredondo-Ponce’s 30th birthday. He is in his seventh year in the Navy and is an aircraft machinist first class. He, like Garcia, was returning to work, at the North Island Navy Base. He had spent the day with his wife at their home in Baldwin Park. When Castillo spun Garcia, Arredondo was perhaps two to three miles behind.

“When I came up on the wreck, all I could see was a van on its side,” Arredondo said. “I knew it had just happened, so I went to the next exit, got off and came back north.”

He parked near the center divider and as he approached, there were about half a dozen people there.

“They were telling me not to touch him,” Arredondo said. “I told them I was military, that we are trained for this, and then I went to him.

“He was passing out. He’d come to and try to put his arm back in place. He drifted in and out and I needed to calm him down. There was blood everywhere and I needed to get as much information as I could for the paramedics before he passed out. Stuff like his name, and if he was allergic to any medicine.”

Arredondo tried to speak English to Garcia and got no reply. Then he spoke Spanish and Garcia responded. Arredondo said he didn’t have a shoelace or anything handy to apply a tourniquet, so he decided simply to use his hands.

“All that was left was about two or three inches below his left shoulder. The arm was hanging by some skin. So I used all the force I could and held on.”

But shortly after he applied his barehanded tourniquet, he realized he had missed one of the steps in his training, which would have been to write on the victim’s forehead, in the victim’s blood, the time the tourniquet was applied, so that when paramedics arrived, they would know better about blood loss, etc. But once you apply a tourniquet, releasing it could cause an onrush of blood, possibly fatal.

“The CD player in his car was still on,” Arredondo said, “and so I counted the songs and calculated about three to four minutes a song. About the end of the fourth song, they arrived.”

Newberry’s report said that Castillo not only failed to stop, but continued on, and apparently exited at Via de la Valle, just ahead of Arredondo. Castillo swung off and back on the freeway north and past the badly injured Garcia. He went north as far as the Carlsbad Village Drive exit, where he got off, rammed another car into the curb and continued on until stopping a short distance away because his tire was flat.

“When our officers got to him, he was sitting on the curb, near his car,” Newberry said. “He was unable to give many details because he was intoxicated.”

Police were able to quickly connect Castillo with the Garcia crash because of matching paint on each car. They also said he is an undocumented resident.

By the time they got Garcia to the hospital, he was close to death because of loss of blood. He later told Mora and the O’Neills that he was cold and blind. They were also told that he had lost nearly four liters of blood. According to the book “Essentials of Human Anatomy and Physiology” by John W. Hole Jr., most average-sized males hold just slightly more than five liters of blood. Other scientific studies show that some people, usually larger males, may hold as many as six liters.

Garcia is 5 feet 10 and 170 pounds.

Garcia is home now. The fact that he escaped other internal injuries will help his recovery. So will Doug O’Neill’s statement that, as soon as he is ready, Garcia has his job back.

Jay Hovdey in the Racing Form reported that Mora took that a step further.

“As long as there is a Doug O’Neill, you have a job,” Mora told Garcia.

But for now, there are large medical bills, murky insurance and workers’ compensation coverage, and the need for an artificial arm and the fitting and therapy that goes with that.

So racing is surrounding one of its own. Three of Doug O’Neill’s leading owners -- Jason Wood and Steve Kenly of STD Racing Stables and Paul Reddam -- have pledged to pitch in, as has Joe Harper, Del Mar’s chief executive. Dennis O’Neill is spearheading a fundraiser that will be held Thursday night at the Hilton Hotel, adjacent to the Del Mar track. It will feature a poker tournament and a new car to the winner, plus lots of silent auction items, and it has a goal of $100,000.

Dennis O’Neill has established a website for all this with a perfect name:

Lavamanshero.com.

Even more perfect is that Arredondo and Garcia are expected to be at the fundraiser.

“I don’t want anything other than seeing him alive,” Arredondo said. “That will be closure for me.”

On Aug. 19, the big horse, as they call him in the O’Neill barn, will attempt to repeat in the Pacific Classic, just as he recently three-peated in the Hollywood Gold Cup.

The race has a $1-million purse. The groom’s share might be enough to start a new porch.