By Rich Seeley
David Kennedy Payne, 28, of Santa Monica was a cool dude, a local hero, a football star, a true friend and a gorgeous actor with a big heart.
And now, for no reason, he is dead.
Last Tuesday night [Aug. 11, 1987] at the corner of Main Street and Pacific Avenue in Santa Monica, the driver of an Isuzu Trooper II hit David’s Yamaha V-MAX motorcycle.
The helmet David always wore cracked like an egg and he was killed. Valarie White, a girlfriend who was riding with him, suffered multiple leg injuries.
The driver of the Isuzu was arrested on suspicion of manslaughter and drunken driving.
David’s best friend, Luis “Lumo” Morris, 31, heard about the accident that night just before last call at Mom’s in Brentwood, where he sometimes works as a bartender.
He left the bar and went to be with David’s younger sister, Sue, at Santa Monica Hospital.
Lumo remembers going into the antiseptic room where his dead friend lay.
“I went in with Sue and she said goodbye and kissed him,” Lumo recalls. “I stayed there a few minutes longer. Then I kissed him goodbye. He was so cold. It’s hard to accept him being so cold.”
Lumo felt he was in another dimension the rest of the week. He tried to work his regular shift tending bar at the Oarhouse in Ocean Park Friday night.
The Oarhouse was the place where he first met David four years ago. Lumo was serving a stint as the manager and hired the 6-foot-2 semi-pro football player to work for him.
Eventually, David started his own moving business and no longer worked at the bar, but he remained a regular with a lot of friends there.
The Oarhouse seemed real sad to Lumo Friday night.
“It wasn’t the usual exuberant place,” he says.
Lumo noticed that someone had drawn a heart around a smiling picture of David that was on the bar’s bulletin board. There were lines radiating out from the heart to photos of all his friends.
People kept coming up to Lumo to talk about David. He couldn’t concentrate on mixing drinks.
Finally, he excused himself and went to be with friends.
“Dave was a great guy,” Lumo recalls. “Anytime he could help somebody he would. He might show up hours late -- that’s California -- but he’d always be there for you. Sometimes he’d call me up and say we got to go do this and we’d go.
Another friend, Shelly Skaug of Venice remembers how David bought the Yamaha V-MAX, he gave his old bike, a Honda Nighthawk, to Lumo.
“He’s always there for his friends,” she says, still speaking of David in the present tense. “His sister lives with him and I know he takes real good care of her.”
It was Shelly who first called The Outlook’s attention to David when she entered him in the paper’s recent search for the Westside’s Cool Dudes.
She wrote in to tell how David cooly took a pistol away from two punks who broke into his house and threatened his sister and two women friends. With the gun to his head, David still managed to distract the would-be robbers so the women could escape. Then he disarmed and captured one of the punks while the other ran away.
“David could have killed that guy,” Lumo says, “but he told me later that it wasn’t his place to take a human life.”
For his cool-headed action, the Santa Monica Police presented David with a Good Citizen’s plaque.
David was everything a Cool Dude and Good Citizen should be.
And now those who knew him are left with memories and dreams of all the things he might have been.
After a year of struggling on the bench, he was finally looking forward to starting as tailback this fall on the California Wolves, a semi-pro football team in Van Nuys.
“He earned that starting job by having a great game in the playoffs when we won the championship last year,” says John Bowker, the head coach.
“He’s a great kid,” Bowker says. “He’s always got a smile on his face. He had a lot of talent. We used to call him Marcus because he had that slashing running style of Marcus Allen. I’ll always remember him dashing through the line with panache.”
After a one-line part on “Dynasty” last fall, playing an emergency room intern struggling to save an accident victim, he qualified for membership in the Screen Actors Guild. With a union card, he was hoping for more television work this season.
Things were looking up this summer. David was in good shape for both acting and football having finally recovered from a back injury he suffered last year when the parked truck he was sitting in was totaled by another drunk driver.
And his friend Lumo had finally returned after being out of town for three months following the death of his mother.
When Lumo first got back to L.A., David told him, “I thought I’d lost you forever.”
Lumo had reassured his friend that he was back in L.A. to stay.
“Now,” Lumo says, “I’ve lost him forever.”
David Kennedy Payne is to be buried today in his hometown of Willougby Hills, Ohio.
Published Aug. 17, 1987, in The Outlook, Santa Monica, Calif.
