Yijing Chen, right, an MBA student at Pepperdine University, and her mother, Hongfen Shen, were struck by a truck in June 2016. Shen was killed, and the driver was sentenced recently to just a year in jail despite lying about her role in the accident. Courtesy photo
The light was green. Yijing Chen remembers it clearly. What happened next was a blur of noise and pain, a nightmare that changed her life forever.
It was June 5, 2016, a sleepy Sunday night in Calabasas, California, north of Malibu. Chen, a Pepperdine MBA student, and her mother, Hongfen Shen, were walking hand-in-hand to the grocery store, a trip they’d made often during the mother’s visit from China. They stepped into the crosswalk along Las Virgenes Road, walking south across the on-ramp to the Ventura Highway.
They were halfway across when they were hit by the truck.
The 2015 Chevy Silverado was black, which may have made it harder to see at 8:30 p.m. on a quiet Calabasas night. Chen doesn’t remember the impact so much as the sound — “a noise like an engine” — and the feeling of her mother’s hand being ripped from her own. At the same time she herself was violently flung to the pavement.
“I was pulled beneath the bumper of a huge truck and run over,” Chen remembers. “I watched as the truck’s wheels crushed my mum beneath them two to three times more. I will never get that image out of my head.”
BEST FRIENDS WHO DID EVERYTHING TOGETHER
Yijing Chen. Courtesy photo
Chen had just completed her first year at Pepperdine’s Graziadio School of Business and Management, where she concentrated in Finance and Digital Information and Information Systems. A native of Hangzhou, China, she planned on a career as an analyst for an investment bank and had chosen Pepperdine over the University of Texas-Dallas because of scholarships — Pepperdine offered about $80,000, all but a few thousand of the total — as well as rank, study-abroad opportunities, and because Southern California appealed to her more than Texas.
Chen’s mother — her only family in her hometown, as her father had died in 2014 — came in April 2016 for a lengthy visit that was scheduled to end in August. It took all of Chen’s financial aid to help her mother with the move. “We didn’t have much, but we were so happy to be together again,” she says. They vacationed together that spring in San Diego, Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, snapping smiling photos everywhere they went.
But they also enjoyed doing more routine things, going to parks and malls and supermarkets. They went everywhere together, Chen says. They were best friends.
On June 5, 2016, they were on their way to get groceries at Albertson’s. “We held hands,” Chen says, “because we were best friends and loved each other so much.”
‘I WAS SCREAMING AND CRYING, TRYING TO GET TO MY MUM’
Police would later say, after a yearlong investigation, that the driver of the truck that hit Yijing Chen and Hongfen Shen was neither drunk nor on drugs. She had not been on her cell phone. All these things might have worsened her eventual punishment. Instead, they concluded, she had been distracted by her dog.
The truck hit Shen full-on, dragging her under its wheels. Her torso was crushed, damaged so badly that a doctor later told Chen he had never seen such terrible internal bleeding. Shen, 53, would die in the hospital five days later.
Chen was clipped by the truck’s rear bumper, fracturing her left leg. She later learned that her leg bone was protruding from her thigh, but at the time she was so in shock that she didn’t realize the extent of her own injury. “The truck drove over us,” Chen remembers, “and finally stopped. I was screaming and crying, trying to get to my mum, who was not conscious. I saw a woman get out of the truck, and I thought she was going to help us, to help my mum. But she did not. Instead, she screamed at us, ‘Why you guys were here?’ I was shocked and I begged her, ‘Please help my mommy! Please! Call 9-1-1! PLEASE!’ But she did not.
“I tried to get up and walk to my mum, but my legs would not work. I did not know it then, but my bone was coming out of my leg, and I collapsed. So I dragged myself with my hands across the road to my mum.”
Hongfen Shen at the Grand Canyon in 2016. Courtesy photo
A STORY THAT DOESN’T HOLD UP, AND A SINGLE MISDEMEANOR CHARGE
The woman who hit Yijing Chen and Hongfen Shen, Nicole Herschel of Malibu, didn’t call 9-1-1. She didn’t hail another vehicle or yell for help from passersby. Instead, Herschel grabbed Yijing Chen’s mother by the wrists and dragged her inert body to the curb, dropping her there. Hongfen Shen did not move, was not breathing. Then Herschel got back into her truck, slammed it in reverse, and hastily parked along Las Virgenes Road.
When the authorities arrived, Herschel pretended to be a witness, lying to the police about her role. She said she had come upon the accident on her way to the grocery store. But she acted nervously, her answers were “evasive,” and police were suspicious. When they interviewed Chen in the hospital, she told them unequivocally that Herschel was no witness — she was the driver who had hit them. A few days later, seizing Herschel’s truck from a parking lot at Los Angeles International Airport, police noted the truck had recently been scrubbed clean — but that marks along its frame seemed compatible with Chen’s mother’s footwear.
Witnesses came forward as well, one saying he’d seen a woman dragging another woman toward the curb at the on-ramp to the Ventura Highway at Las Virgenes Road, another affirming that he’d seen a stopped pickup on the freeway on-ramp and a woman getting inside, then backing up against traffic to park along Las Virgenes.
The California Highway Patrol completed its investigation in July 2017 and identified Herschel as the driver, recommending three charges: misdemeanor counts of vehicular manslaughter and tampering with evidence, and felony hit-and-run. But the Los Angeles district attorney’s office didn’t agree, only charging Herschel with the misdemeanor manslaughter charge, which carries a maximum sentence of one year. Prosecutors later said they charged only what they could prove beyond a reasonable doubt.
In November, Herschel, 36, pleaded no contest and was given the maximum sentence. She was then granted until late January 2018 to turn herself in.
SEEKING JUSTICE AMID A FOG OF GRIEF
Courtesy photo
Yijing Chen protested to prosecutors about the single misdemeanor charge, and she protested again to the judge when Herschel was sentenced to a year in county jail. In vain. “I have spoken with all prosecutors who handled my case,” she says. “They all thought the misdemeanor charge is not reasonable but they can do nothing.” Chen is now pursuing a civil case against Herschel, though investigators have found that Herschel is bankrupt and her insurance would cover only about $50,000 of Chen’s $140,000 hospital bill. Desperate, Chen is also pursuing a White House petition seeking justice, including more jail time for Herschel — though given the Trump administration’s silence on all petitions for the last 11 months and the news December 18 that the petition tool at the White House website will be temporarily removed until the new year, that is an avenue unlikely to achieve the desired result. If the accident had happened in China, Chen says, Herschel would have received at least three years in prison.
Since the time of the accident, Chen tells Poets&Quants, she has lived in a fog of grief and pain. Her psychological trauma was matched by her physical suffering. She needed a wheelchair for six months; she now has a rod in her leg, and still takes medication for pain and stiffness and to help her sleep. She took a year off classes, with Pepperdine Graziadio granting her an extension and financial support, but in that time she sank into a funk of bereavement. One classmate says she barely saw Chen because she shut herself away completely. Chen acknowledges her poor grasp of English made it difficult to confide in colleagues, and some of her closest Chinese friends have already returned home.
Like many universities, Pepperdine offers an array of options for students who are grieving. The school has a Counseling Center, and it gives wide latitude in the extension of programs, financial aid, and emergency housing options. For Chen, outside of her scholarship money, Pepperdine covered her remaining fees, she says, about $5,000. But though she was offered well-being counseling, spiritual counseling, or help from the school CARE support team, she declined them all. “After the accident, I locked myself in my room and I did not see my classmates at all, except a few staff from Pepperdine University,” she says. “Everything is pointless to me, only my friends who cooked for me and brought me foods could see me. Finding justice for my mum is the only faith which sustained my life. The school offered counseling and I did not take (it). I did not tell anyone about my pains and sufferings because I distain myself and I felt self-abasement.”
A NEWFOUND URGE TO HELP
Chen, now 27, remembers her mother’s sacrifice to help her family after her father became sick in the early 2000s. Hongfen Shen quit her job as a chemical engineer because she could earn more driving a taxi, working 18 hours a day to help take care of her ailing husband, who died of a heart attack in 2014, and to send her daughter to Singapore to get an undergraduate degree. It’s a model of sacrifice Chen says she hopes to follow now that her life has so drastically changed course.
Chen is scheduled to receive her MBA from Pepperdine in the spring. She no longer plans to become a financial analyst — now she wants to work for a maker of autonomous automobiles, “to save more innocent people from negligent drivers.” She has applied for some jobs and is awaiting a response. And though she had planned to stay in the U.S. for a few years before returning to China to live with and care for her mother, now, with no close relatives in her hometown, she expects to stay in the U.S. longer, depending on employment.
“I wanted so badly to give back to my mum,” Chen says. “I came to America in August 2015 on a scholarship to study for my MBA at Pepperdine University. I was so happy to be here, because this wonderful country was going to help me fulfill my dreams of being able to help provide for me and my mum. I have American dream, and I believe I could find it here. And then on Sunday, June 5, 2016, that all changed forever.”
Chen wants justice for her mother — but also for others who may experience similar tragedies. Her GoFundMe account is dedicated not just to pursuing a lawsuit against the driver who killed her Hongfen Shen, but to “establish a fund of justice for Chinese” and “utilize every penny to do meaningful things, either to my family or to the society. I want to change something!”
See a video of Yijing Chen’s story by CLICKING HERE.
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