This story is published in collaboration with KCET.
As the country erupted in protest against racial and economic inequalities in June 2020, two 22-year-olds and their unborn child lost their lives in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Wilmington, California. They weren’t killed by police or by COVID-19, but the place where they died embodied those same inequalities.
The young couple, Issac Muriel and Chyna Waddle, died in a fiery crash, their small gray sedan crumpled under a three-ton big rig truck on the Pacific Coast Highway. The Wilmington stretch of that highway is not the two-lane, happy-go-lucky road that has become synonymous with California’s coast, but rather a six-lane behemoth that serves as a 24-hour artery for semi-trucks headed to and from the Port of Los Angeles on the edge of Wilmington’s industrial corridor. As Muriel and Waddle took their last breaths, to their left and right sat two refineries that spewed out a combined average of 400 pounds of toxins into the air every day that year.
