Months after a Palm Desert man was killed crossing the street, his family doesn't know why

In late May, Monica Satcher Sierra received an unexpected call from the Riverside County coroner. Her 83-year-old father had been hit by a car and killed while crossing the street near a shopping center in Palm Desert.

The caller asked her the last time she'd seen her father and some other questions about the simple life he led in the desert. She was told an approximate location of the collision. The approximate time.

And that it had happened 21 days ago.

"Three weeks ago? Really?" she remembered asking as her grief compounded with frustration. "I asked what took so long. They said something like they had a hard time finding me."

Satcher Sierra said she had trouble understanding that. Her father, Clement Michael Satcher, who went by Mike, had her listed as his emergency contact at the Palm Desert apartment complex he rented from, and she had met one of his neighbors there. She recently visited and helped him after a medical procedure. She said she’s been at the same job for about 20 years in Orange County and has had the same phone number for about 30.

"How is it that hard to find me?" she ruminated during a phone interview. "I wonder if they even tried."

The Riverside County Sheriff's Department, which oversees the coroner's bureau, didn't respond to a message from The Desert Sun seeking comment for this article. Sheriff's investigators have never told Satcher Sierra why the car hit her father, its speed or other details about his cause of death, saying the case is still open.

She’s since taken matters into her own hands and is asking anybody with information about the death of her father to help her better understand what happened.

An engineer and an artist

Mike Satcher was a quiet, active and independent man deceivingly talented in the arts given the technical focus of his career, his daughter said.

He grew up in Los Angeles County and joined the United States Army in the early 1960s. After his military service, he worked for decades as an electrical engineer and draftsman with companies ranging from aerospace manufacturers to Disney.

He had two children, Monica and her sister, Catherine Arteaga, who died in 2012. He had three wives in total, but had been single for many years before his death, Satcher Sierra said.

He settled in the desert in the late 1990s, working for a time as a caretaker at a ranch in Desert Hot Springs and later residing in Cathedral City and Palm Desert. He was an avid walker, Sierra Satcher said, even in the summer heat. And he stayed busy as a substitute teacher around the Coachella Valley, where he told her he tried to teach students about art whenever he could.

Since his young adulthood he wrote poetry and painted abstract figurative acrylic paintings, often on canvases as big as 4 by 5 feet. Satcher Sierra was his nearest relative and one of the few still alive at the time of his death.

She last saw him in February or March, when she and her husband, Martin Sierra, drove out from Orange County and caught a movie with him after eating BBQ. He was in good spirits and health apart from surgery for an eye condition a couple of years before.

"It was always great to see him and spend some time," she said. "We'd end up back at his house; he'd talk about things he was writing about and his paintings. He was smart, creative. And he was unique, that's for sure."

A return trip to the hardware store

The sheriff’s department reported in a news release on May 5 that a pedestrian had been struck the day before in the 74-000 block of Alessandro Drive in Palm Desert. The department said the man appeared to have been attempting to walk south across the street when he was hit. He had life-threatening injuries, they said, and was taken to a hospital, where he died.

Drugs and alcohol did not appear to have been a factor in the fatal accident, the department reported, and the driver did not flee the scene. The department said the man would not be identified until the family was contacted. But the department never publicly identified Satcher.

The coroner who called Sierra Satcher on May 25, told her about as much. Since then, she's found out more on her own.

About a quarter to 6 p.m. on May 4, Mike Satcher stepped onto Alessandro Drive walking south toward the Ace Hardware on Highway 111 in Palm Desert. He was returning to the store after buying a large set of tools earlier in the day. His Honda Civic was parked in the store's auxiliary parking lot to the north. He looked both ways, but his view to the west might have been obstructed by a large van parked there.

He took a few steps into the road and a car traveling westbound struck him and stopped. He was thrown a good distance onto the pavement. Several passersby saw the collision or heard it. One rushed into the store to tell the employees, and another called the police.

Sierra Satcher knows this because she went to the Ace and asked if the employees there knew anything about the collision, which shut the road down weeks before.

They did, she said.

In fact, Larry and Spencer Dorn, father and son who operate the store that has been in the family since the 1970s, had video footage they provided to the police. Sierra Satcher told them she didn’t want to see it because it would be too disturbing. Spencer Dorn was working that day and described what he had heard from customers and told police. Paint still lines the pavement demarcating where investigators collected evidence into the night.

The details the Dorns provided amount to the most information Sierra Satcher has received about her father’s death from anyone — including the sheriff's department.

"You'd think they'd be done with this by now," Larry Dorn said. "I hope she gets some closure."

Trying to move on

Sierra Satcher and her husband, Marty, drove out to Palm Desert the weekend after she got the call about her father's death. They found a spare key to his car and drove it away from the Ace after speaking with the Dorns.

She went to the Palm Desert sheriff's station to ask for more information, but it was closed due to the Memorial Day holiday.

They eventually cleaned out her father's home. They put his belongings in a storage shed in Santa Ana. His remains were cremated on July 7. And she is planning on having him interred at the Miramar National Cemetery.

Though the sheriff's department said he was officially pronounced dead at a hospital, she doesn't know which one. And she doesn't know whether he actually survived that long, was conscious or had anyone with him in his final moments. His clothing and other effects he had on him at the time are still in the sheriff's custody as the investigation is ongoing. She has called the detective she was told is in charge of investigating the death about 10 times, she said, most recently on Monday. She has not been called back.

Satcher Sierra is angry. She's trying to grieve and find closure, but feels constrained by a lack of answers. And she hopes that isn't the result of police neglecting the investigation of an 83-year-old father, artist and substitute teacher's death.

“I want to know if this is being properly investigated, because I want to know what happened,” she said.

Christopher Damien covers public safety and the criminal justice system. He can be reached at christopher.damien@desertsun.com or follow him at @chris_a_damien.

This article originally appeared on Palm Springs Desert Sun: Months after Palm Desert man was killed, family still asking why