Leonard Pitts: It can happen here

I was maybe 10 years old when this happened.Mom is driving, I’m in the back seat. It’s night. She’s trying to cross Vermont, a busy L.A. thoroughfare, from a side street. Southbound traffic is jammed, but a guy in a truck makes a hole and waves us through. We’ve almost cleared the intersection when a car, speeding northbound, clips us. We go spinning up over a low brick wall onto somebody’s lawn. My head smacks the window hard enough to crack it. And I remember thin