West Portal Crash Vigil Held as Lurie Safety Deadline Nears

Dozens gathered outside the West Portal Library on Thursday evening to remember Diego Cardoso de Oliveira, Matilde Moncado Ramos Pinto, and their two sons, Joaquin and Cauê, killed two years ago when a driver struck them at a nearby bus stop. Family members traveled from abroad for the vigil, many meeting in person for the first time to mourn together. Photos of the four victims hung along a clothesline near the crash site as attendees left written messages.

“The loss is still here. We feel it every day,” said Denise Cardoso de Oliveira, Diego’s sister. “Tonight, it’s not just about grief. It’s about love. It’s about connection. It’s about remembering the energy they brought into this world.”

The vigil, organized with support from Walk San Francisco and the Bay Area chapter of Families for Safe Streets, came at a pointed moment. Mayor Daniel Lurie’s Street Safety Initiative hits its 100-day deadline next Wednesday, and advocacy groups are watching closely.

Mary Fong Lau, now 80, was charged in July 2024 with four counts of gross vehicular manslaughter after allegedly driving into the family at 70 miles per hour. Last month, Lau changed her plea from not guilty to no contest, allowing the case to move toward conviction without a trial. The change followed an earlier attempt in January to have the charges reduced.

Friends and relatives of the family say the legal outcome has left them hollow. “It doesn’t feel like she has any remorse,” said Fabio Benedetto, a friend of the couple. “She never said I’m sorry. She never looked to the families.”

Judge Bruce Chan has indicated he is unlikely to impose prison time given Lau’s age and lack of prior criminal record. She is expected to receive two to three years of probation and a temporary driving ban. Family members have launched an online petition urging the judge to revoke Lau’s license permanently and impose house arrest and mandatory community service with real teeth to it.

Beyond the courtroom, relatives are pursuing a wrongful death lawsuit and allege that Lau and her family have attempted to shield assets by transferring properties out of her name. That allegation adds a financial dimension to what is already one of the most painful traffic fatalities in recent San Francisco memory.

Walk SF used the vigil’s timing to press Lurie directly. The Street Safety Initiative, which the mayor authored and signed in December, created what Walk SF calls the first-ever Safe Streets Task Force within the Mayor’s Office. No previous San Francisco mayor had taken that structural step. “We are eager for Mayor Lurie to share what the progress has been,” the group said in a release.

The urgency isn’t abstract. A two-year-old girl was killed at a Mission Bay intersection in late February, one of several pedestrian deaths that have occurred in San Francisco in recent weeks. The city’s streets have a long record of killing the people who use them, and community organizations have spent years documenting the gap between political promises and protected infrastructure.

San Francisco’s Vision Zero policy, adopted in 2014, set a goal of zero traffic deaths by 2024. The West Portal crash happened during that target year. The two-year-old killed in Mission Bay died well past it. The deadline came and went without the goal being met, and advocates now measure progress in much smaller increments, including whether a mayor’s 100-day benchmark produces anything concrete.

For the families who came to West Portal on Thursday, the policy calendar feels distant from their grief. The crash took four people who had done nothing wrong, standing at a bus stop. What they are asking for, from the court and from City Hall, is a signal that San Francisco treats that kind of loss as a structural failure worth fixing, not just a tragedy worth mourning.

Lurie’s deadline arrives next week. Walk SF and Families for Safe Streets will be at the table expecting answers.