He Was Just a Big Kid

Originally Published July 12, 2012

He was just a kid when I met him.  Just a couple months out of high school when the city hired him as a part-timer in my department.  Big, black German kid.  I know, right?  But his father was in the military and his mother was very much a German freulein.  It was always funny to hear him speaking German despite appearances. 

Like I said, we hired him right out of high school so he was still very raw but he showed promise and dedication in production.  Plus, he was just a kid.  Hazing him was pretty easy.  Being an only child, his mother seemed to dote on him and would always be calling to check up on him.  It didn’t take long for me and the other guys to start joking with him about his mom.  One day, he had enough and he practically turned into Eric Cartman before our eyes.  “GOD DAMNIT, QUIT TALKING ABOUT MY MOM!”  I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t breathe. 

And the ladies loved him, which was so unusual to see how uncomfortable he seemed to be when he was getting their attention.  During a shoot, the dean of admissions was our guest, he was behind the camera and whenever we took a break, she would make some remark about what a handsome young man he was.  We told him to see if she could get his admissions fees waived.  Another time we were all at lunch and the waitress was shamelessly flirting with him.  I mean, it was so obvious to all of us that we told him he HAD to at least get her number before we left.  Somehow, he turned into Beaky Buzzard.  “Uh-huh, nope, nope, nuh, no, huh-hu…nope.”

And boy, the day we found out he suffered from arachnophobia…  It was ON.  We shared a workstation in the control room and he had a habit of leaving himself logged in while he stepped out of the room.  So many is the time we changed his wallpaper to something big, hairy and 8-legged.  Oh, I lost track of how many times he would gasp and cringe when he logged back in. 

He tried so hard to get over his fear.  And with us being non-stop about it, he really did work on it.  Even going so far as to squirming through some National Geographic shows about spiders I intentionally watched while he was in the room.  He somehow ended up closer to the TV than I was and, of course, to mess with him, I started wadding up little bits of paper to toss at the back of his head.  The show was about a family that raised spiders in their basement so they could “milk” them for their venom to make antidotes.  In a perfect twist of fate, as they had an extreme close-up of a spider being tipped from one container to another, I managed to land a small wad of paper down the back of his shirt.  The fit that he threw as he simultaneously fell out of the chair onto the floor while trying to reach down the back of his shirt…  priceless. 

Another time a few of us went to lunch while he stayed in the office to work on something.  We discovered a tiny, little spider in the car of the guy who was driving and realized, this was just too good to pass up.  Danny caught the little guy into a napkin and we went back into the control room As Jarrod and I kept him distracted, Danny walked around behind him and opened the napkin on the keyboard in front of him.  He turned and looked to see what it was and the spider started crawling towards him.  OMG, the scream he let out.  He pushed himself off the desk and hit the cabinet behind him.  In two steps he was out the door of the control room.  3 more steps he crossed 50 feet as he bolted through the council chamber doors and kept running outside.  I think I was literally rolling on the floor laughing so hard. 

He was a good kid though.  He volunteered with the fire department, dreaming of someday being a firefighter.  I did a few ride-alongs with him as the driver when I needed some footage for a project I was working on. 

He eventually left the city when he landed a job in public safety as a Riverside County Sheriff dispatcher.  I didn’t see much of him since then.  I think the last time I saw him was on a visit to Moreno Valley about a year or so ago.  We only talked for a few minutes….

Dominic was killed this morning at 5:45 am when his motorcycle was struck by a red pickup truck that made a left turn in front of him.  He was 30 years old.