By Josh Kleinbaum, Staff Writer
If visitors are wearing black when they drop by Natalie Darmedjian’s hospital room, her family gives them colorful shirts and jackets to wear instead.
Nobody wants Darmedjian to know that Araksia Muradian and Ani Muradyan, her two best friends, are dead.
Muradian, 17, and Muradyan, 16, were killed and Darmedjian was critically injured Monday night when Muradian’s 2001 Toyota Avalon slammed into a pole on Coldwater Canyon Avenue. The dead girls were cousins.
Darmedjian, sitting in the back seat, suffered broken bones in her legs, hip and chin. And her family doesn’t want the trauma of her friends’ deaths to hamper recovery at Providence Holy Cross Medical Center.
“First, we started off by telling her that one has a broken hand and the other has a broken leg,” said Ahgavni Abdallah, Darmedjian’s cousin. “Now, we’ve increased the severity. Her mom tells her, ‘They’re not doing too good. We don’t know if they’ll make it.”‘
The three girls, friends since middle school, were on their way home from their part-time jobs at a telemarketing firm at the time of the crash, Abdallah said.
Abdallah said Darmedjian told her family the Avalon was involved in a chase with another car.
“From what Natalie told us, a black car was in front of them with Armenian (window) flags, and all of them wanted to see who was in there,” Abdallah said. “It seems like it was a chase. We don’t know who was provoking who.”
But police say Muradian was speeding in the left-turn lane on Coldwater Canyon Drive, near Oxnard Street, trying to pass two cars, when she lost control and slammed into a pole. They estimate she was going 70 mph in the 35 mph zone.
“All of the witnesses that have been identified provided the same information,” police Detective T. Wolfe said. “They were driving way too fast. No other cars were involved, and there was no apparent reason why they were driving too fast.”
Darmedjian’s family urged others to learn from the tragedy.
“At that age, nobody realizes how important your life is, and how much driving fast can end that,” Abdallah said. “Speed, it’s the enemy.”
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