It was a sunny Saturday in the West Portal neighborhood of San Francisco. The public library was bustling, and so were the cafes and ice cream shops.
Just outside the library, a mother, a father and their two little boys waited for a bus ride to the San Francisco Zoo. A perfect way, the couple figured, to celebrate their fourth wedding anniversary.
Then, at 12:12 p.m. on March 16, 2024, a boom shook the neighborhood, and the horror that followed still reverberates in San Francisco today.
A white Mercedes S.U.V. had traveled at highway speeds before it jumped the sidewalk, sheared a street pole, smashed a bolted-down garbage can and obliterated the bus stop. It finally came to a halt when it crashed into a fire hydrant.
The father, Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, was flung into the air and landed more than 100 feet away, witnesses estimated. The mother, Matilde Ramos Pinto, was trapped in the wreckage, fading in and out of consciousness.
Nearby, her baby cried.
“I was talking to the lady and making sure she stayed awake,” recalled Rolf O’Grady, who rushed to the scene after hearing what he thought was a bomb going off. “She didn’t say a word. I just kept telling her that her baby was fine.”
Her 3-month-old, Cauê, was not fine. Neither was Joaquim, the couple’s 20-month-old toddler, his body launched with his father’s and left unrecognizable.
Within days, all four would be dead. The baby was the last to go after his two grandmothers made the decision to pull him from life support, holding his tiny hands as he died.
Two years later, the woman who killed them, Mary Fong Lau, is expected to plead no contest on Friday to four felony counts of vehicular manslaughter. In exchange, Ms. Lau, 80, is likely to avoid prison or home detention.
For many San Franciscans who still think about the tragedy, it raises a question: How should a driver be punished for killing four people?
‘Forever imprisoned in the grief’
Mr. Cardoso de Oliveira, 40, grew up in Brazil, and Ms. Ramos Pinto, 38, in Portugal. They met in London and moved to San Francisco after he had been hired as an associate creative director at Apple a few years ago. Ms. Ramos Pinto was a producer at Ridley Scott Associates, a production company founded by the British filmmaker known for “Alien” and “Gladiator.”
The couple was vibrant and happy together, siblings of each said. They raised their boys in the Mission District of San Francisco and loved the city, especially being outside, barbecuing with friends, sailing on the bay or taking the children to the playground at Dolores Park, a palm-tree studded, sun-soaked oasis.
There, a plaque on a bench commemorates the family with the message: “Enjoy every moment.”
In the two years since the crash, the case has progressed through San Francisco Superior Court. The parties agree that Ms. Lau was not texting or talking on her phone before the crash. Her car did not malfunction. She was not under the influence of alcohol or drugs, and there was no obvious medical incident.
But she was driving as fast as 75 miles per hour, three times the speed limit, before she killed four people.
Judge Bruce Chan said in a hearing last month that he intended to accept Ms. Lau’s plea of no contest to the manslaughter counts. In exchange, he would sentence her to two to three years of probation. Prison time would amount to “mere vengeance,” he said, and home detention and community service would not serve any purpose.
The judge cited Ms. Lau’s age, her lack of a criminal record and her expressions of remorse shortly after the crash.
“My feeling is that just as this family is forever imprisoned in the grief and the tragedy, Ms. Lau is also going to spend the rest of her days living with the knowledge of the harm that she caused to so many others,” Judge Chan said, according to a court transcript.
Judge Chan, through a court spokeswoman, declined to comment further.
The victims’ relatives are outraged. Some are flying from as far as Portugal for a vigil at the crash site on Thursday and for the court hearing on Friday afternoon.
They have collected more than 12,000 signatures on a petition condemning the sentence proposed by Judge Chan.
‘Did I kill that baby?’
Ms. Lau’s lawyer, Seth Morris, said that she does not know what happened the day of the crash except that she was driving to deliver soup to her brother in West Portal — and then her car was accelerating and she could not stop it.
She is depressed and has said she wishes she could trade places with the family she killed, Mr. Morris said in an interview.
“She’s living this life in her own mental prison at this point,” he said.
Ms. Lau grew up in poverty in China, then immigrated to San Francisco for an arranged marriage and worked long hours as a seamstress in the city’s Chinatown, Mr. Morris said. She eventually managed to buy her own factory.
Her husband died in a car crash when she was 25, Mr. Morris said. A death notice in The San Francisco Chronicle from Aug. 10, 1970, noted the passing of Jenson Lau, 26, the husband of Mary Lau, though it did not say how he died.
They had three children, Jeffrey, James and Janice, whom Ms. Lau raised alone. Mr. Morris declined to make his client available, and the children did not respond to interview requests.
Two years ago, immediately after the crash, Ms. Lau sat on the sidewalk with a bystander, Madeline Monge.
It was the boom that drew Ms. Monge to the scene, so loud that she thought two trains might have collided in the nearby subway station. She ran there and, after seeing that the crash victims were being attended to, turned to the S.U.V., its airbags deployed and steam emanating.
There, she found Ms. Lau bleeding and in shock and helped her leave the vehicle.
“It took her probably 30 to 45 minutes to really kind of get out that she had just messed up,” Ms. Monge said. “She hit the gas when she thought she was hitting the brake.”
Ms. Lau broke down when an ambulance arrived to take the baby away.
“She reached out her arms and was crying, ‘Did I kill that baby? Did I kill that baby?’” Ms. Monge recalled.
Extra layer of trauma
So what would be a fair punishment for Ms. Lau? There is agreement among the family’s relatives, the district attorney and witnesses at the crash site that keeping an 80-year-old woman out of prison makes sense.
And there is precedent for the light manslaughter sentencing of an older driver. In 2003, George Weller, 86, killed 10 pedestrians at the Santa Monica Farmers Market after confusing the gas and brake pedals. He received five years of probation. The judge in that case said that Mr. Weller’s age and declining health had contributed to the decision.
Still, in San Francisco, relatives described the proposed sentence as too light, and as an extra layer of trauma that made losing their loved ones feel even worse.
The district attorney, Brooke Jenkins, has filed a motion asking Judge Chan to reconsider. While she does not think that Ms. Lau intended to hurt anybody, she believes Ms. Lau deserves punishment beyond probation.
“We feel absolutely no sense of justice and that these lives were lost in vain,” Ms. Jenkins said.
The family of the victims is frustrated that Ms. Lau will not be required to plead guilty or issue a formal apology in court. The judge said he was waiving those actions because they could affect civil suits that the family has filed against her.
And under the terms suggested by Judge Chan in court last month, Ms. Lau would be eligible to regain her driver’s license after serving probation.
The district attorney and extended family say that home detention and mandated community service would be appropriate — and that Ms. Lau’s driver’s license should be permanently revoked.
The family is skeptical of her remorse. They say that shortly after the crash Ms. Lau transferred several properties in California out of her trust and into the names of family members. After those transactions were called out in the civil suit, she transferred them back. Mr. Morris said she had been given bad advice by a previous lawyer.
He said in the last hearing that he had offered “a process of restorative justice where we could all talk and honor each other’s harms,” but that the plaintiff’s lawyer had rejected it. Neither the district attorney or the lawyer in the civil suit say they have received such an offer.
Denise Cardoso de Oliveira, Diego’s older sister, has flown from Florida to San Francisco to attend every hearing in the case, tallying nine so far. She said she has longed for some personal gesture from Ms. Lau.
“She has never spoken to us,” Ms. Cardoso de Oliveira said. “She has never made eye contact. I have never heard her say, ‘I’m sorry.’”
Georgia Gee contributed research.
Heather Knight is a reporter in San Francisco, leading The Times’s coverage of the Bay Area and Northern California.
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