Thump. Gasp! Thud.

That's how the deadly accident happened on my way home from work Monday evening.

I had just turned onto South Montclair Street off Stockdale Highway and was driving fairly slowly, 25 to 30 miles per hour.

I was listening to music and thinking about my dog and how happy he would be to see me...How happy I would be to see him.

My window was rolled down and, in less than a second, I saw from the corner of my eye how the low-flying bird (What was it thinking?!) was caught in mid-flight by the top rear corner of the window frame on my car door. He was knocked first onto my neck and left shoulder before sliding down my chest onto the floor of the car, just behind my feet.

I slowed down instinctively. I had to stop the car. Get out the cell phone. Call animal control — they'd know what to do.

“No Parking,” the first strip of curb I came up to said. The following one was fine to park in.

I looked at the bird. It was a young pigeon, grayish-brown in color.

It was still alive and its right wing appeared to be broken.

It was lying on its left side, its right eye looking up at me and its beak opening and closing slowly, pathetically. It wasn't making any sounds. It wasn't bleeding.

And then, its beak just stopped moving. Its right eye was still open but the life had gone out of it.

“Don't touch it with your bare hands,” I thought, thinking SARS and West Nile virus. I took some things out of a plastic shopping bag and used it to grab it.

Its head flopped lifeless to one side as soon as I picked it up. I saw that the other eye was closed — unnaturally, grotesquely. Maybe from the force of the impact.

“Oh, God, it's dead. I'm sorry, I'm sorry.”

Emotion hit me like a wave: This was the first time I had witnessed death come upon a warm-blooded living being. I was, to a certain extent, the cause of the bird's undoing. “It's not fair how animals suffer because of humans,” was my thought at the time. But it was an accident.

I set the bird out on the ground just outside my car door. I had to call someone.

Jose, a good friend in L.A., was always a comforting one to call in such situations. He's always stoic and level-headed. And he usually answers his cell phone.

He listened, laughed at the unlikeliness of the accident — “In all my life I've never heard of something like that happening” — and told me I should bury it.

“But I don't have a shovel.”

He suggested I say an “Our Father” for the bird before I put it in a Dumpster. “That's all you can do,” he said.

I did say a prayer for the pigeon. I was glad it didn't suffer long. I was glad it didn't bleed. I had to hope that it had enjoyed a happy life until the accident. That when it hatched, its mother had been glad that it had made it out of its egg and chirped and begged to be fed.

I had seen road kill so many times but never been a participant in it. Not until that moment.

I cradled the bird in my hands. I could feel the lingering warmth of its body through the plastic bag. I stretched my arm as long as I could inside the empty Dumpster behind my building. The lifeless bird thudded when it it the bottom.

Life is as fragile as a dove in flight, I thought.

I showered as soon as I got back from walking my dog, as one can never be too careful. Later, I had one too many shots of tequila.

— Posted by Louis Medina, Californian staff writer