A Biker Sat Down Next To An 8-Year-Old At A Bus Stop And Told Her “Your Dad Isn’t Coming” — The Internet Called Him A Monster Before Anyone Knew Where He’d Been An Hour Earlier
Part 2
I want to tell you what the internet did with my video. Because I lit the match.
I posted it at 4:58 p.m.
By 6:00, it had been shared eight thousand times. People were stitching it. Dueting it. Adding sad music and red arrows pointing at the biker.
A woman in Ohio with two million followers reposted it with the caption This is why I don’t let my kids out of my sight.
A man in Texas with half a million followers zoomed in on the patch on his vest. HIGH DESERT RIDERS. Reno. Somebody find out who this is.
By 8:00, somebody had.
The club has a Facebook page. Two hundred members. Photos from charity rides. Toy runs. A poker run for a kid’s cancer treatment. In one of the photos, a big gray-bearded man stands next to a Road King holding a giant check.
Somebody circled him in red.
FOUND HIM.
His name was Curtis Whitaker. Fifty-four.
By 9:00, the internet knew where he worked. Silver State Towing on East Fourth Street. Somebody found a photo of him on the company website, standing in front of a flatbed truck. Our drivers: Moss — 19 years with us.
By 10:00, the company’s phone was ringing nonstop. The night dispatcher, a woman named Gloria, told me later she stopped answering at eleven. The messages filled the voicemail.
You employ a monster.
Fire him or we’ll make sure nobody ever calls your company again.
I hope somebody tells HIS kids their dad isn’t coming.
The club’s Facebook page got four thousand comments overnight. Most of them unrepeatable.
Somebody posted a house address. It was the wrong house. An elderly couple in Sparks got a brick through their front window at two in the morning.
I watched all of it happen. In real time. Lying in my bed with my phone.
I’m telling you the truth here. Part of me felt sick.
And part of me felt good.
I had the most viral video I’d ever made. My follower count went from forty thousand to a hundred and sixty thousand by morning. Brands were messaging me. A local news station asked if they could use the footage.
I said yes.
They aired it on the morning show. Viral video shows biker making child cry at Reno bus stop. They blurred the little girl’s face. They didn’t blur his.
Here’s what I didn’t do.
I didn’t watch the video again. Not carefully.
I didn’t slow it down.
I didn’t wonder why a man would pull over, walk up to a child he didn’t know, sit down beside her, and say those exact words.
I didn’t wonder why his knees were wet.
I didn’t wonder why his hands were stained.
I didn’t wonder why he was shaking so hard.
I didn’t wonder why, when she started screaming, he didn’t leave.
I’d seen fourteen seconds. I decided I knew the whole story.
People who were there told me later what happened after I drove away.
A man named Ray Ochoa was walking his dog across the street. He’s the one I saw stop and stare. He stood on the opposite corner the entire time.
He told me the biker didn’t move from that bench.
He took off his vest and his shirt and wrapped the shirt around the little girl.
She was screaming. She hit him. Small fists against his chest and arms. He let her. He didn’t grab her hands. He just sat there and let her hit him until she ran out of strength.
Then he made a phone call. Ray heard part of it.
“Yeah. Plumb and Wells. The bus shelter. She’s here. I found her. I’m staying with her.”
Then he made another call. Shorter.
Then he sat there.
The girl stopped hitting him. She sat stiff on the end of the bench, as far from him as she could get, crying into her backpack.
He didn’t touch her. He didn’t move closer.
He just stayed.
Ray said the streetlights came on. A bus came and went. The biker waved it on. It got cold. The biker sat there in his t-shirt.
After about twenty minutes, the little girl scooted over. Just a few inches.
After half an hour, she leaned against his arm.
Forty minutes after he sat down, a white county car pulled up to the curb. A woman got out with a lanyard around her neck. She walked over to the bench and knelt down in front of the little girl.
Ray said the biker stood up, finally, and walked a few steps away, and put both hands over his face.
Ray stood on that corner until the woman, the girl, and the biker all left together. The biker followed the county car on his Harley.
Ray didn’t film any of it.
“Didn’t feel right,” he told me.
Part 3
The morning after I posted, I woke up to a hundred and sixty thousand followers and a message from a reporter at Channel 4.
They wanted an interview. The woman who caught the cruel biker on camera.
I said yes.
I put on makeup. I met the reporter at the coffee shop where I worked. We sat at a table by the window, and I told her what I saw. I said it made me sick. I said I couldn’t believe anybody would do that to a child. I said I hoped that little girl was okay.
I believed every word I said.
They aired it at noon.
By noon, the club had posted something on its Facebook page.
Four lines.
We know what you saw.
We know what you think.
We ask you to wait.
Moss is with the family.
Four thousand people replied. Almost all of them said the same thing. Excuses. Gang protecting their own. Disgusting.
I replied too.
I wrote: A child was crying her eyes out. What exactly are we waiting for?
It got eight hundred likes.
By early afternoon, there were people outside Silver State Towing.
Not a lot. Maybe fifteen. A couple of them had signs. One said MONSTER in red marker. A woman was livestreaming from the sidewalk.
The owner, a gray-haired man named Frank Delucchi, came out and stood in front of the gate with his arms crossed. He didn’t say anything to them. He just stood there.
Somebody yelled, “Where is he? Where’s your monster?”
Frank said, “Home. Asleep. He was up all night.”
“Doing what?”
Frank looked at them for a long time.
“You’ll find out,” he said. And went back inside.
That afternoon, I was refreshing my phone every thirty seconds. Watching my follower count. Watching the comments under my video. Two hundred thousand comments by then.
I was proud.
I’m telling you that so you understand how far I fell.
At 4:15 p.m., my phone buzzed with a news alert.
Reno PD releases details of fatal Kietzke Lane crash.
I almost swiped it away. I didn’t know why I opened it.
A 36-year-old Reno man was killed Wednesday evening when a commercial box truck ran a red light at the intersection of Kietzke Lane and Moana Lane at approximately 4:31 p.m. The victim, identified as Daniel Reyes, was driving northbound…
I kept reading.
The first person on scene was an off-duty tow operator who stopped to render aid and remained with Mr. Reyes until paramedics arrived…
Kietzke and Moana.
Three kilometers from Plumb and Wells.
4:31 p.m.
I’d hit record at 4:52.
I stopped reading. I sat on my couch. I went back to my video.
For the first time, I watched it slowly.
His knees. Dark. Wet.
His hands. Stained red-brown in the creases.
Shaking.
I turned off my phone.
Part 4
The full story came out over the next three days. From the police. From the girl’s grandmother. From the county social worker. From Moss’s club.
And later, much later, from Moss himself.
Here it is.
Daniel Reyes was thirty-six. A single father. An HVAC technician. His wife died of a brain aneurysm when their daughter was three. He’d raised her alone for five years.
Her name was Sadie.
Every weekday, Sadie went to an after-school program at a community center on Wells Avenue. At 4:50, the program’s van dropped her at the bus shelter on the corner of Plumb and Wells, two blocks from their apartment.
At 4:55, her dad picked her up. Every day. For two years. He never once missed it.
He’d text her when he left work. She had a little flip phone for emergencies. That afternoon, at 4:24, he texted her.
Leaving now bug. 10 min. Love you.
At 4:31, a box truck ran the red light at Kietzke and Moana and hit the driver’s side of his pickup at forty-five miles an hour.
Moss was three cars behind him.
He’d just finished a tow job on South Virginia. He was heading home on his Road King. He saw the truck run the light. He saw the impact. He heard it.
He was off his bike before the glass stopped falling.
He’s a tow operator. He’s been at a thousand wrecks. Before that, he was an Air Force medic. He knew what he was looking at. He knew it was bad.
He got the passenger door open. He climbed in.
Daniel Reyes was still conscious. Barely.
Moss called 911 with one hand. With the other, he held pressure where he could. He knelt on the floorboard of that crushed pickup, in glass and everything else, and he talked to him. Kept him talking.
“What’s your name, brother?”
“Danny.”
“Okay, Danny. Help’s coming. Stay with me.”
Danny’s eyes found him.
Moss told me later that he’d seen that look before. In the Air Force. In a hundred wrecks.
A man who knows.
Danny grabbed Moss’s wrist. Hard.
“Sadie,” he said.
Moss leaned in. “Who’s Sadie?”
“My girl.” His breath was going. “Bus stop. Plumb and Wells. She’s waiting.”
Moss held his hand.
“I’ll get her,” he said. “I promise you. I’ll get her.”
Danny’s grip tightened once more.
“Tell her.” He was barely whispering. Moss put his ear right next to his mouth. “Tell her eat her dinner. Don’t be scared of the dark.”
Then his grip let go.
The paramedics arrived ninety seconds later. They worked on him for twenty minutes. They couldn’t bring him back.
Moss stood on the sidewalk on Kietzke Lane with his knees soaked and his hands covered in a stranger’s blood, and he told the first police officer on scene what Danny said.
The officer said they’d send someone to the bus stop. Child protective services. As soon as they could. It could take an hour. Maybe more. They were short-staffed. It was rush hour.
Moss looked at his watch.
4:47.
An eight-year-old girl was sitting alone at a bus shelter in the dark, watching every car, waiting for a father who was never going to come.
“No,” Moss said.
He got on his Harley.
He didn’t wash his hands. He didn’t clean his knees. He didn’t think about what he looked like.
He rode three kilometers to Plumb and Wells.
He found a little girl in a purple coat on a bench under a cracked plastic roof, leaning forward every time a car went by.
He told me he sat on that Harley for maybe thirty seconds before he got off. Trying to figure out how to say it.
There’s no way to say it.
He thought about lying. Telling her he was a friend of her dad’s. That her dad was running late. Waiting with her until the social worker came.
He couldn’t.
“I wasn’t gonna let her sit there hoping,” he told me. “Watching every car. Thinking he’d just pull up any second. For an hour. Two hours. And then somebody else tells her.”
He shook his head.
“Hope like that, when it breaks, it breaks you worse.”
So he walked over. He sat down beside her.
He told her the truth.
Your dad isn’t coming, sweetheart.
That’s where my fourteen seconds came in.
Part 5
What my video didn’t show is what he said next.
The social worker told me. Her name is Deborah Kline. Washoe County Human Services, after-hours response. She got to the bus stop at 5:32. Moss told her everything while Sadie sat wrapped in his denim shirt.
But before Deborah got there, Moss had told Sadie the rest.
After she stopped hitting him. After she stopped screaming. After she scooted those few inches closer and finally leaned against his arm.
He said, very quietly:
“Sadie. Your daddy told me to tell you something.”
She looked up at him.
“He said, eat your dinner.”
Her face crumpled again.
“And he said don’t be scared of the dark.”
Deborah told me that was the moment Sadie stopped fighting.
She put her head down on his arm and cried, but differently. Softer.
And she said, through her tears, “He always says that.”
Every night, at bedtime, when the light went off, her father stood in her doorway and said the same thing.
Don’t be scared of the dark, bug. I’m right here.
Moss didn’t leave when Deborah got there.
Sadie wouldn’t let go of his hand.
So Deborah asked if he’d follow them to the police station on East Second Street, where they’d wait while Deborah tried to find family.
He said yes.
He rode behind the county car the whole way.
They waited in the family room at the Reno Police Department. A small room with a couch, two chairs, a box of tissues, and some toys in a bin. A detective came in and out. Deborah made phone calls.
Sadie’s only living family was her grandmother. Danny’s mother. Lucia Reyes. Sixty-four. She lived in Sacramento.
Deborah reached her at 7:15.
Lucia got in her car.
It was snowing on Donner Pass. Chain controls on I-80. A trip that normally takes two hours took nearly eight.
She didn’t get there until 4:02 a.m.
Moss stayed the whole time.
Nine hours.
He didn’t go home. He didn’t wash up beyond what he could do in the station bathroom. The detective gave him a gray Reno PD t-shirt to change into.
He sat on that couch with Sadie. He got her a grilled cheese sandwich from the vending machine. She ate half of it, because her dad said to eat her dinner.
Around ten, she asked him to turn off the overhead light because it was too bright.
He turned it off. Left the lamp on.
She looked at the dark corners of the room.
He looked at them too.
“Not scared,” she said.
“Me neither,” he said.
Around midnight, she fell asleep on his shoulder.
He didn’t move for four hours.
The detective told me later that he came in at two to check on them and found the big gray-bearded biker sitting perfectly still on the couch with a sleeping eight-year-old against him, his arm going numb, his eyes wide open, staring at the door.
“He said he wasn’t gonna be asleep when her grandma came in,” the detective said. “Said somebody ought to be awake.”
At 4:02, Lucia Reyes came through the door in her coat, snow still on her shoulders.
She saw her granddaughter asleep on a stranger’s shoulder.
Moss looked up at her.
He didn’t say anything. He just nodded.
Lucia knelt down in front of them and touched Sadie’s hair. Sadie woke up. Saw her grandmother.
Then she turned and looked at Moss.
“Grandma,” she said. “This is Moss. He was with Daddy.”
I asked Moss, months later, why he stayed. Nine hours. With a child he’d never met.
He was quiet for a long time.
Then he told me about Elko.
He was nine. 1973. His mother put him on a Greyhound bus from Winnemucca to Elko to meet his father, who was going to pick him up at the station. His father worked at a mine. He’d come get him after his shift.
Moss sat on a bench at the Elko Greyhound station for two days.
Nobody came.
Nobody told him anything.
The station manager let him sleep on the bench. A waitress at the diner next door gave him toast.
On the third morning, a sheriff’s deputy came and sat down next to him and told him his father had been killed in a cave-in two days before.
“Two days,” Moss said. “Every time the door opened, I thought it was him.”
He looked at me.
“I wasn’t gonna let her do that. Not one hour.”
Part 6
On Friday morning, two days after I posted, I took the video down.
Then I sat on my bedroom floor and filmed myself. No makeup. No filter. No music.
I said who I was. I said what I’d posted. I said what I’d assumed.
Then I said what really happened. All of it. Every word I’ve told you.
I said his name. Curtis Whitaker. Moss.
I said I was sorry.
I said that I’d taken fourteen seconds of the worst moment of a man’s life, the moment he was keeping a promise to a dying stranger, and turned it into content.
I said I’d made four million people hate a man who stayed awake for nine hours so a little girl wouldn’t be alone.
I posted it. I didn’t read the comments for a week.
It got more views than the first video.
On Saturday, I drove to Silver State Towing on East Fourth Street.
The protesters were gone. Somebody had left flowers by the gate instead. And a hand-lettered sign. WE’RE SORRY, MOSS.
Frank Delucchi let me in. He didn’t say anything.
Moss was in the yard, under a flatbed, changing a hydraulic line.
He rolled out when he heard my footsteps. He looked at me for a long time.
He knew who I was.
I told him I was sorry. I’d practiced it in the car. It didn’t come out the way I practiced. It came out in pieces.
He wiped his hands on a rag. Slowly.
“You saw a kid crying,” he said. “You thought somebody was hurting her.”
“I should’ve—”
“Yeah,” he said. “You should’ve.”
He didn’t let me off easy. I’m glad he didn’t.
Then he said, “But you were worried about her. That part was right.”
He put the rag in his back pocket.
“Next time,” he said, “stay and find out.”
Then he rolled back under the truck.
The High Desert Riders started a scholarship fund for Sadie that week. The Danny Reyes Fund. They put the link on their Facebook page, the one with four thousand angry comments on it.
The same people who’d called him a monster gave.
In a month, the fund raised two hundred and eleven thousand dollars.
Lucia moved from Sacramento to Reno that spring, into Danny’s apartment, so Sadie wouldn’t have to change schools.
Every year since, the club holds a ride on the second Saturday in November. They ride from Kietzke and Moana to Plumb and Wells. Three kilometers. Slowly. Two hundred bikes.
It ends at the bus shelter.
Part 7
But that’s the club’s ride.
Moss has his own.
Every year, on November 14th, at 4:52 p.m., a dusty Road King pulls up to the curb at Plumb Lane and Wells Avenue.
Moss gets off. He walks to the bus shelter.
And Sadie is there. Waiting on the bench.
She’s fifteen now. Tall. Dark hair cut short. A sophomore at Reno High. She wants to be a paramedic.
He sits down next to her.
They don’t talk.
Not really. Maybe a word or two. Mostly they just sit. Under the cracked plastic roof. Watching the cars go by in the November dusk while the streetlights flicker on.
After a few minutes, she says the same thing every year.
“Ate dinner.”
He nods.
“Not scared of the dark,” she says.
“Me neither,” he says.
Then she gets up, and hugs him, and walks two blocks home to her grandmother’s apartment.
And he gets back on his Road King and rides home.
I know because I’m there.
Every November 14th. Parked across the street. In the same spot where Ray Ochoa stood with his dog.
I asked their permission the first year. Sadie said yes. Moss shrugged.
I don’t film it.
I don’t post it.
I don’t even take out my phone.
I just sit in my car with the window cracked, and I stay.
The whole time.
Until the streetlights are all the way on, and the girl is home, and the Harley’s taillight disappears down Plumb Lane toward the mountains.
Then I go home too.
Fourteen seconds is never the whole story.
I stay now.
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