Angel Naranjo’s father visits site where teen died riding minibike

The father of the late Angel Naranjo and a lawyer toured the site of boy’s tragic minibike crash on the Las Vegas Wash Trail in east Las Vegas on Friday morning, looking for answers to what happened.

Rudolfo Naranjo and attorney Dan Hill stood on the asphalt biking path adjacent to the wash beside a makeshift memorial for the 16-year-old boy, who was killed on July 30 when the minibike he drove ran over a cable and caused him to fall to the pavement.

Naranjo and his son Arley, 19, were there to light Catholic prayer candles at the base of a lamppost that had a white cross and a torn tire tube attached to it where Angel Naranjo’s fatal accident was said to have occurred.

“We’re kind of just paying some respects to Angel and put some candles out,” said Hill, who declined to give details on what they were looking for. “It’s a tough day for everybody.”

Rudolfo Naranjo, who declined to comment, picked up a loose cable attached to a nearby fence and pulled it across the trail to a different lamppost, as if to measure its length, while an assistant to Hill took photos of the area with her mobile phone.

The boy had been driving his minibike, with Arley Naranjo driving behind him on another minibike, sometime after midnight when he was struck by the cable and died at the scene. His brother was injured but survived.

Angel’s father and the attorney were at the scene Friday just hours before the scheduled start of the boy’s funeral at Palm Downtown Mortuary and Cemetery, 1325 N. Main St. in downtown Las Vegas.

Roughly 100 people gathered at the mortuary near Main Street and Owens Avenue to pay their respects to the Naranjo family.

Mourners began filling up the chapel around 4 p.m. and continued in a steady stream for the next two hours. Several flower arrangements surrounded Angel’s open casket as a slideshow of his photos played on screens.

Some sat in the pews while others walked in groups up to Angel’s casket where many stood for several minutes at a time.

Just after 5 p.m. on Friday, Rudolfo Naranjo was consoled by family and friends as he walked from the back of the room up to where his son lay. Some mourners wore white shirts with a picture of Angel on the front, while a handful wore the branded shirts and jackets of Equipo Academy — Angel’s high school.

At the mortuary, Rudolfo played video on his phone from the wash earlier in the day, saying that if officials didn’t clean up the area, another person could be seriously injured.

A Clark County spokesperson this week declined to comment about whether the county had plans to clean up the trail.

An investigation by the Metropolitan Police Department found that the boy’s minibike drove onto the cable, which was lying slack on the ground, but on impact rose up and hit him, knocking him onto the ground in what the department considers an accident.

Police are still looking into the incident, but there was no update on its progress Friday, Metro officials said.

The Clark County coroner’s office has not yet released the results of an autopsy on the teen nor the cause of his death.

But the boy’s family insists that the crash was the result of someone deliberately setting up the cable over the trail to potentially hurt someone riding on it.

“It’s not an accident,” Arley Naranjo has said.

The site is between East Lake Mead Boulevard and Owens Avenue east of Pecos Road on the trail, which runs through North Las Vegas, Las Vegas and Clark County land. Under government regulations, the trail is reserved for things like bicycles and skateboards, and motorized vehicles are prohibited.

A similar incident happened in east Las Vegas back in 1977, when a man and his 10-year-old nephew were riding dirt bikes on a trail near Ringe and Kell lanes when they both struck a thin, taut wire stretched across two telephone poles, according to a front-page article in the Review-Journal.

The man was hit in the shoulders and the boy in the neck, but neither one was seriously hurt. Las Vegas police at the time said it appeared someone had intentionally placed the wire over the desert trail popular with dirt bikers and horse riders, according to the article.

Contact Jeff Burbank at jburbank@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0382. Follow him @JeffBurbank2 on Twitter. Review-Journal staff writer David Wilson contributed to this report.