Diego Macellaro

I met Diego only briefly, a few days ago. He came to New York to work on an animated commercial.
He was VP Creative Director at Saatchi Venezuela. We walked in the snow in Times Square and in the park in Dumbo, had fusion food at Koi and pizza at Grimaldi's, where he was appalled at the rudeness of the service and the Magnificent Arepa and I assured him, not very convincingly, that it was all part of the charm. He struck me as an atypical creative director. Nothing in him advertised the calculated hipness that is often customary in the advertising business. He was charming and easy going and laid back and very cool. He told us he still loved to draw. He enjoyed himself immensely, was totally not high-maintenance and he also seemed very talented.
He was 48 years old and had two young children.
He was killed by a female drunk driver as he got out of the car in front of his house in Caracas, coming back from the airport. He was standing on the curb, taking either his keys or his cellphone out. She struck him so hard, his body flew about 4 meters.
Even if I only spent a few lovely hours in his company, I am very upset about Diego.
Sometimes the untimely death of someone utterly tangential in our lives creates an enormous sense of shock and grief. Perhaps it was because I had just met him, there is a terrible sense of lost potential, and the shock and fear and disbelief of the random, stupid cruelty of the accident. The horrible reminder of how fragile we really are.
But besides a sadness I can't seem to shake off, I feel a terrible rage.
Even though the driver ended up crashing into a wall, nothing happened to her. I hear she is loaded and loaded with lawyers. So I hope guilt eats up her entrails every second of her waking life, and nightmares hound her in her sleep for as long as she breathes. Because most likely, she ain't gonna spend a minute in jail.
Car accidents are the number one cause of death in Venezuela. The roads and signs are terrible, there is not enough police and people drive aggressively and irresponsibly. There is a lot of drunk driving. Many families count 2 or three victims of car accidents. You hear people say: my grandpa, my father and my cousin all died in car wrecks. People think this is normal.
In fact, last year Hugo Chavez decided to ban the sale of alcohol over the weekend of Holy Week in order to curb road fatalities and people almost rioted against it (the one thing that could cost him his job, the people's right to drink themselves to death). I hate the macho irresponsibility, the constant flirtation with disaster, the mindless love of chaos, the childishness of it all. It's a Latin American thing, the cavalier disregard for human life, when it comes to sober, responsible behavior. It sickens me.
I feel for Diego's family: his parents, his wife and children, his friends and colleagues, who I am sure adored him.