A Christmas Story, released in 1983, has become an American classic for the Christmas season — a colorful depiction of life in Hohman, Indiana, in the 1940s unlike any other. Decades later, the man behind the film saw a much darker fate.
It was April 4, 2007, and 67-year-old Bob Clark, the director of A Christmas Story, was driving away from his Pacific Palisades condo in Los Angeles, California, with his 22-year-old son Ariel Hanrath-Clark. The two were headed for Santa Monica, but only minutes after getting on the road, a 2007 GMC Yukon hit the Clarks’ 1997 Infiniti sedan head-on.
{snip} The man who hit and killed the Clarks was Hector Manuel Velazquez-Nava, an illegal alien from Mexico with a criminal record.
Velazquez-Nava, police soon learned, had a blood-alcohol level...