I was looking at the early stories on the death of the Angels’ prize pitching prospect, Nick Adenhart, when someone in the sports department of the New York Times called and asked me if I could get on the story, and then I was off and running. Funny, but right off I was thinking it was a sad local story. It hadn’t struck me right off that it was a sad national story. But it was.

Things were chaotic, at Angel Stadium, as you might imagine. To the point that the media relations department was not taking calls, according to the woman at the main switchboard. Not even from someone doing a story for the New York Times. I mean, taking calls from the media is the media relations department’s job. But I can understand that they probably were overwhelmed … and they also were pulling together a 10:30 a.m. press conference.

The press conference was very emotional. Of course. And Scott Boras, Adenhart’s agent, was the most emotional, as you probably know if you saw the video or heard the audio. I know it’s fashionable, fun and easy to trash Scott Boras and, well, no, I wouldn’t and couldn’t do what he does for a living, but if you think it through, who knows a player as well as his agent? A manager probably doesn’t. A general manager almost certainly doesn’t. Scott Boras probably knew Nick Adenhart better than anyone in the room, and I have no doubt his tears were real and heartfelt.

The rest of the Angels weren’t going to be in the stadium until 3, for a team meeting, so I decided to go to the accident scene. To have a sense of what it looked like.

At 11:45, nearly 12 hours after the accident that claimed three lives, including Adenhart’s, the Fullerton police still were studying the scene. Orangethorpe Avenue, a major east-west corridor in that part of town, still was blocked off … as was Lemon Street, a significant north-south street.

I parked about a half-mile away, as close as I could get … and hiked in.

Most of the wreckage ended up in the southeast corner of the intersection. There was the silver Mitsubishi that Adenhart and three others were riding in, actually up on the corner on which a strip mall stands, pretty much “wadded up” — as NASCAR drivers describe crashed cars. The top had been shorn off. Someone at the press conference asked if it had come off in the accident, and the police said, no, it had been cut off while emergency workers were pulling people from the car. And only a few feet away, facing toward the curb, was the maroon minivan that, police said, was driven by an under-the-influence kid named Andrew Gallo. He also was 22, perhaps the only thing he had in common with Adenhart.

A third car was in the intersection, as well, another minivan, with its hood popped up. It was in the left-turn lane, more or less, of Lemon, leading on to the west-bound side of Orangethorpe.

I tried to piece together in my mind how the accident happened. It was tough. My understanding was that the Mistubishi was headed north on Lemon, if I heard the cops correctly. So if both the car and the minivan ended up on the southeast corner, the minivan must have been traveling east on Orangethorpe. Right? And how was the third car involved? I decided I didn’t have enough information.

It was eerily quiet. In part because there was no traffic. In part because the hundreds of people who had walked as close to the accident scene as they could were no closer than 100 feet … and seemed unusually respectful. There was a bit of a gawker feel to things, but most of people appeared to be Angels fans, or baseball fans, anyway, and they acted almost as if they were at an outdoor funeral. They chatted quietly in small groups. They repeated information and misinformation they had heard. They were very subdued and mostly sad.

Someone said the minivan driver ought to “suffer” to “pay” for what he had done. No one in that small group of apparent strangers contradicted him.

I talked to a few of the people watching. One woman, Janette Mendez of Anaheim, said she was there because she is an Angels fan and because she had been part of a very similar situation — broadsided in the middle of an intersection by a drunken driver who had run a red light. At Broadway and Brookhurst, in 2006. But she lived, obviously, albeit with back and neck injuries. “My car spun and hit a tree, just like this.”

Dario Valdovinos was there, wearing an Angels cap and T-shirt, and when I asked him about the old idea of the Angels franchise being a lightning rod for bad luck, he said he had been thinking exactly that. “It’s like they have a curse on them,” he said. “When they won the 2002 World Series, it was lifted, and now it’s started happening again.”

I walked over to the dance club where Adenhart and friends had been to … or were going to … named In Cahoots. I was looking for someone to ask about the accident, but the place was shut down tight. I peered through a fence into the main entrance, and all I could see where plastic chairs and tables and trash on the ground. I could imagine everyone just dropping everything and running outside, when the accident occurred. That is, if the club were still open.

I went back to the stadium, which is about 5 miles from the accident site (I clocked it) … and on the way was told by someone in Angels PR that the players would not be available, after their meeting with management. One veteran baseball writer said, “We’ll see about that.” We knew from experience that athletes don’t always do quite what their minders want them to do.

Before going into the stadium, I paused for a while at the makeshift memorial being created by grieving fans. I had never noticed this before, but on the big patio behind home plate at Angel Stadium (you know, where those giant red helmets are propped up high?) is an outline of a baseball field, white paint on the light-red bricks that form the patio. There even is a raised area between home and second base that represents the pitchers mound, and already flowers were beginning to pile up. And rally monkeys. Pictures of Adenhart. Fans were driving into the parking lot, getting out, and dropping off things, some of them. Others just walked up and looked and were quiet. Five TV vans were on the scene, and a couple of reporters were doing live standups with the memorial as a backdrop. You could hear their voices above the hushed fans, as the TV guys talked to their offices and did take after take for later viewing.

I talked to more fans there. It was quiet and respectful. The only sudden movements came when someone accidentally dislodged a baseball from the memorial, and it began rolling away until someone fetched it and returned it to the mass of flowers and pictures and stuffed animals. I remember one fan placing a loose baseball in the arms of a rally monkey.

I went up to the press box. One of 8-10 people in there, working. Funny, in that two of them were guys I’ve known for 30 years — Gregg Patton, the columnist for the Press Enterprise, and David Leon Moore, the L.A.-based sports guy for USA Today. I looked out at the mound a time or two, thinking that half a day ago the guy I was writing about had stood there and thrown six scoreless innings against the Oakland Athletics.

It was already 1:30, by the time I got to the box. I was nearly done with my story when it got to 3:30, and someone heard that the players were getting ready to leave the clubhouse.  One of my colleagues sighed and said, “Time to go play the ghoul.” One of those journalism things: You really, really do not want to be asking about someone who just died, but you have to. It’s part of the job. There is no pleasure in it. I’m not sure people understand that.

We got down to the clubhouse door, and someone from the Angels media department said “the stadium is closed,” several times, meaning we couldn’t attempt to follow players out of the clubhouse as they went to their cars. Reporters would be limited to trying the cell phones of the players they had numbers on. Before we were shooed away, I could see players coming out in small groups, headed for the dugout, the field and their vehicles. None of them seemed interested in bucking authority and talking to us.

I filed my story just before 5 p.m. because it was already 8 in New York. You can see that story here.

It’s always weird/unsettling for a sports journalist to write what is, essentially, an obituary on an athlete who was so vibrant only a few hours before. We think in terms of statistics and performances and color and celebrations, and we rarely are asked to deal with death and cops and carefully sprinkle words like “alleged” and “according to the police” into our copy.

It was interesting, too, to see how big the story was in SoCal. Adenhart wasn’t a star. He might have been, someday, but he wasn’t yet. Casual baseball fans probably never had heard of him.

But there was something about being 22, being struck down so young, by an alleged drunken driver running a red, killed with friends — and only hours after the best performance of his life, one that left him elated, Boras said, when Nick Adenhart met with Boras and Adenhart’s dad, Jim — whom Nick had called in Maryland, on Tuesday, and asked him to come see him pitch. Something about that combination of facts grabbed even non-fans.

At the end of the day, it was only peripherally a story about a young baseball player and two of his friends, dead. It was more about wondering how DUI offenders and people with suspended licenses can get into cars over and again and threaten every single one of us with their speeding vehicles. Isn’t there something we can do about this?

I believe that’s what most everyone wondered, once they got past the crumpled Mitsubishi, the Angels uniform and three young lives snuffed out.