From: Mitchell Day [Email him]
I just discovered who Bob Clark was....and how he died. He was a movie director. He directed two of my all time favorite movies: the cult horror classic Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things which I saw when I was about ten years old and one of my favorite Sherlock Holmes movies: Murder By Decree starring Christopher Plummer. I also looked him up on your site to see if you knew about his death. Of course you did.
Here's how Wikipedia puts it:
"Clark and his son, Ariel Hanrath-Clark, 22, were killed in a head-on car crash on the Pacific Coast Highway in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles on the morning of April 4, 2007. The crash occurred when an SUV crossed the median and struck Clark's Infiniti I30, causing the closure of the highway for eight hours. Police determined that the SUV's driver, Hector Velazquez-Nava, had a blood alcohol level of three times the legal limit and was driving without a license. He initially pleaded not guilty to two counts of gross vehicular manslaughter, but changed his plea to no contest in August. On October 12, 2007, Velasquez-Nava was sentenced to six years in prison under the terms of a plea agreement. In addition, he may face deportation to his native Mexico, as he entered and was living in the United States illegally."See previous letters from Mitchell Day.
James Fulford writes: Bob Clark is most famous for directing the classic movie A Christmas Story, which I personally have never seen, but can recite lines from, because people keep reciting them at me. I didn't know that he'd done Murder By Decree, which I did see. In 2011, another reader had the same experience (A Christmas Story Fan Discovers What Happened To Director Bob Clark—Killed By An Illegal Alien DUI ) I told him that we covered this death at the time it happened, and during an appeal in 2010, a reader wrote in asking if Hector Velazquez-Nava, who had been sentenced to 6 years in jail, was still in prison. I checked in 2011 with the California Department of Corrections website, and I believe he's out. Clark, of course, remains dead.
When the San Francisco Chronicle did an A Christmas Story: Where are they now? feature in 2014, Brenda Walker noted that they said nothing about who killed him. Donald Trump is the only political figure in America who has been willing to mention such deaths.
