COMMENTARY : Human Solution Is Needed to End Senseless Border Deaths : The government should know that some of the people it is trying to catch are desperate enough to try running across a crowded freeway in the dark.

The San Diego Freeway between San Clemente and Oceanside is probably the darkest stretch of freeway in Southern California. Whenever I enter the darkness that begins at San Onofre, I’m always afraid of a mechanical breakdown before Oceanside, since I’m always reminded of those “true stories” I heard as a child of madmen with hook-hands and pickaxes who prey on those unwise enough to run out of gas or unlucky enough to get a flat tire on a dark road.

On Saturday night, July 28, that stretch of road seemed particularly dark. Beginning at the Border Patrol check-point south of San Onofre, four lanes of northbound traffic were backed up for miles. I remember hoping to avoid that mess on the way home the next night, when something low to the ground suddenly appeared in front of me. Moving from left to right, it seemed to move without volition, as if it were being blown by the wind.

In front of me to my right, people were walking against the traffic from a pickup truck parked at the side of the road. They were looking at what was blowing across my path. I couldn’t see their faces. It was too dark, and I was moving too fast. But something in the way they moved betrayed horror and shock.

I couldn’t make out what the object in front of me was. At first I thought it was a sofa or mattress that had fallen off the truck. In my confusion, I didn’t even want to consider that it might be human or might have once been a part of a human. I don’t know if I hit it or not. There was no thump.

Within a fraction of a second, I was back in darkness, trying to decide whether or not I should stop. But it was dark outside, and the scene of the accident was already behind me. The farther I drove, the more likely it seemed I had hit a person. I decided to drive on to the rest stop a few miles down the road and phone the CHP. On the way, I passed emergency vehicles coming in the other direction.

All day Sunday the scene kept playing in my head. Then Monday morning in the San Diego edition of The Times I read that what I had seen had shortly before been part of a person who had tried to cross the freeway hand-in-hand with another person. I thought of my wife. And I thought of love.

When I finally talked to the CHP officer investigating the accident on Monday morning, he tried to reassure me, telling me that the victims had been hit by a number of vehicles before I had arrived on the scene, and even if I had hit something, whatever I had hit was no longer a person by the time I had hit it.

On the way back to Costa Mesa on Monday morning, I was finally able to cry. The closer I got to San Onofre, the more uncontrollable my sobbing became. They were tears of mourning and tears of rage.

Mourning for the dead. And rage at the Border Patrol and the federal government for what I perceived to be its wanton disrespect for human life.

I am not taking issue with the need for a checkpoint somewhere on the San Diego Freeway, whether to relocate and remodel it or where the border patrol should concentrate its efforts. Those are political questions. What I do want to question is the safety issue, and the decision to operate the checkpoint at night in a place of almost complete darkness.

The Border Patrol should know that some of the people they are trying to catch are desperate enough to try running across a crowded freeway in the dark; and in doing so are inexperienced with our freeways and the number and speed of the cars coming at them.

Why doesn’t some agency put in lights so that drivers would have a better chance of seeing people running across the road? Why isn’t there a fence high enough to discourage people from making the attempt in the first place? Why weren’t adequate remedial steps taken to prevent these needless deaths?

The two deaths were meaningless and perhaps avoidable. Although we can’t bring the victims back, we can at least give their deaths a semblance of meaning by now taking steps to help prevent what happened that night from happening again.

In another news story I learned the names of the people who had died holding hands on the freeway: Ruben Calderon and Josephina Salgado-Uriostegui. They were on their way to visit their son in Santa Ana. I mourn for them and their families. And I mourn for the people in the red truck on the side of the road and the others who now have to live with the memory of what they saw that Saturday night in the darkness south of San Onofre.