> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Keeping it real at a recovering market - URL: https://www.smdp.com/keeping-it-real-at-a-recovering-market/ - Published: 2006-07-17T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-23T21:08:00.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: Business, Venice, #archive-import, Homeless *Growing pains* *By EMILIE PHELPS Special to the Daily Press* Yesterday marked three years since the driver of a Buick LeSabre barreled westbound on Arizona Avenue through the bustling Santa Monica Farmers’ Market, killing 10 people and injuring more than 50 others. Behind the wheel was George Russell Weller, an 89-year-old Santa Monican due to stand trial this September on ten felony counts of vehicular manslaughter. Weller has pleaded not guilty, claiming he accidentally stepped on the gas rather than the brake at 1:47 p.m. on July 16, 2003\. Nathan Peitso, a vendor of baby-lettuce from Venice, was one of the first people to Weller’s car. Peitso — who testified at the preliminary hearing, and may be asked to again at the trial — says he will always see the Farmers’ Market site in a different light: “When I walk down the street where it happened, they repaved everything and it’s like it never happened. People walk and I just think, ‘You guys don’t really know what happened here.’” Still, the 25-year-old Peitso was back on Arizona Avenue for the very next market after the crash. Peitso has been working at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market since he was 12 years old. At the time of the crash, he was working for Maggie’s Farm, owned by his father, and presently he works for Kenter Canyon Farms, which is owned by his mother. Their largest farm is located in Santa Paula, which spans about 150 acres and grows organic lettuce, herbs, tomatoes and more. Peitso sat down with the Daily Press last week to discuss the business of farming and life after the crash. HOW HAS YOUR BUSINESS GROWN OVER YOUR LIFETIME? “We started in a friend’s backyard in Berkeley, and we had no money. We’d drive an old Dodge with two different color doors. We were just cutting for Chez Panisse, which is a restaurant Alice Water owns, and my mother was a waitress at that restaurant. So when \[my mother\] became pregnant with me, she couldn’t be a waitress anymore, so she started selling salad... She called it The Salad Co. and it got some notoriety because nobody was doing... baby mixes, baby salads. It was like the European version of salad, and nobody had seen that here, as far as being available for restaurants. So she kind of found a little niche, and we were charging an outrageous amount for the salad back then, because nobody could get it. It was $30 a case — the golden days. So we moved down to Los Angeles to expand on the market here. There were a lot of restaurants that wanted to buy our stuff, like Wolfgang Puck’s. We bought our first farm in the early 80s — in Reseda, where it used to be orange groves. Then we went out to Agoura, and then we found the farm out in Santa Paula.” IS “BABY LETTUCE” A NORMAL-SIZE SPECIES OF LETTUCE? “It’s like any other lettuce, it would grow into a head, but we cut it when it’s young, about 3 inches. We have about a two-week turnover.” DO YOU HAVE COMPETITION AT THE FARMERS’ MARKET? “At the Santa Monica Market? Not too much, because we do baby lettuce and everybody else does big-head lettuce if they’re gonna do lettuce, because it’s really labor-intensive to do the baby lettuce. You kinda have to be set up for it.” WHAT’S THE PROCESS LIKE OF GROWING BABY LETTUCE? “You have to have a lot of land, and you have to be able to cut it really quickly, so you have to have a lot of equipment that can get it from the fields into a refrigerated holding area and then to be washed, because it’s all muddy. And the washing machines, they’re enormous factory-style washing machines and they cost millions, so it’s a big investment to get into that. We’ve got to harvest it, mix it, clean it, pack it.” WERE YOU ALWAYS PLANNING ON BEING A FARMER? “No, I never really wanted to be a farmer. I thought about medicine, and I went to school for it for a while, but the length of school versus the payoff wasn’t as good as being a farmer. When you’re born into it, it’s pretty good. Starting it by yourself is hard.” DO YOU SPEND TIME WORKING AT THE FARMS? “As little as possible... I’ve been out there, I’ve pulled weeds, I’ve repaired machinery and things, and mostly what I’ve done is managing labor, like telling them where to plant, what to plant, when to cut; even that I try to stay away from because I’m more of a salesperson.” WHAT IS THERE TO GROWING “ORGANIC” PRODUCE? “It’s really a pain. You have to document all the seeds that you buy, and you don’t have to use organic seeds, but you have to at least show that you tried to use organic seeds. If they’re not available, then you can use nonorganic seeds. If you’re going to use pesticides... amendments that you add to the soil like fertilizers, things like that have to be organic. The tools that you use, if you have a mixed-use farm... have to be cleaned before the change-over from one place to another... It’s almost like handling toxic waste — they can’t touch anything else.” WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO USE ORGANIC PESTI- CIDES? “A pesticide is a pesticide is a pesticide, but some are considered less harmful, they’re biodegradable, they’re brought up from plants and things like that, so they’re not chemical.” Have you seen many changes at the santa monica farmer’s market over the years that you’ve been there? “Farming’s become more chic. It used to be I was embarrassed to be a farmer. ‘What do your parents do?’‘Uh, they own some... land,”I didn’t say that they were farmers. But now it’s really posh, so that’s changed. I think the farmers have started making a little more money than they used to, so they spend more time on their booths and making them look good. The variety’s really increased. It used to be that everyone had tomatoes and corn and peppers... but now it’s really taken off, and a lot more people are into it, too.” What happened in your experience on the day the car crashed through the santa monica farmers’ market? “The Market, at that time, ended at 2 \[p.m.\] So I had just done my own shopping... and I started to hear crashing and banging and people screaming and was like, “What is going on?” I thought some freak was throwing tables around or something. Then I saw what looked like canopies getting dragged and torn... Then I saw the car, and it bottomed out at the dip there at Arizona and 2nd. There was an old man on the hood and people were flying off this thing because it was a packed street... And people were just pushing over each other and running over each other to get out of the way and being thrown through the air. He banged and made a bunch of noise because he hit the dip pretty fast, but \[the car\] started to slow down right away because there were people underneath his car, so it was slowing him down. He passed 2nd Street and went down about half way to Ocean, and that was where his car stopped. My dad and I thought it was a terrorist because it was right after 9/11, and we figured like, ‘Ahhh! Terrorist! Go kill him!’ so we ran over there with the expectation to pull out some young guy and beat him to death, I don’t know, we were really pissed at that point, mob him, yeah. And it was an old man, and we didn’t know what to think. It really took us aback. It was myself and this guy \[who\] owned Claude Martin Farm, and him and I got there first. We pulled the door open, my dad was right behind me, and we grabbed the keys from \[Weller\] — he didn’t want to give up his keys — we tried to unbuckle his seat belt and get him out, and we were screaming at him that he was a murderer and all this stuff. We got him out of the car, and he just sorta had like a weird expression on his face, and was sort of chuckling to himself, like he meant to do it. And that’s what I maintain to this day — that it wasn’t an accident, because how do you drive through three city blocks full of people and not hit the brake? He had his foot on the gas, not the break. He just snapped, I don’t know — somehow was unstable, went psychotic for a minute, but I don’t think it was an accident. He meant to do it. Whether or not he was in his right mind, I don’t know. But it was creepy and sinister. So the mob grabbed him, and the horn had been going off the entire time, and the car was just battered with people and blood all over the car. It looked like there were pomegranate seeds everywhere, and as I got closer they were teeth from people. It was incredibly gruesome, really gruesome... We tried to help the guy that was on the hood of the car off so we could lift up the hood and cut the battery and get the horn to stop blaring, and the guy was just stiff as could be and he was dead. That was the first person I saw that was dead... So we started to smell gas, and we thought that the gas tank was now leaking, and so we looked underneath the car and we saw a woman that was now pinned, and her neck was completely twisted; it was really bad. So everybody got around the car, and there must have been 15 people who lifted the car up and off of her. But she was not doing too well — her mouth kept opening and closing, and she was sort of looking dazed, of course. And then I started to take the whole scene in. My dad was just saying, ‘Oh God, oh God,’ and he went back to our stand, was like, ‘Let’s get out of here, let’s pack up, this is bad news.’ I’d been trained in first and second aid, so I thought I should render some assistance, but I started to really freak out. So I was backing away from the car and I bumped into something and I looked back and there was a woman lying in blood, and it was apparent to me that there were a lot of people that were really, really hurt... That was when I saw a woman who was cradling her baby, and the baby’s arm was really swollen and her little lip was quivering, and so she was in need of help. The woman said, ‘My baby’s been hit and I need to get an ambulance,’ and I was about to get on my phone to call an ambulance, but they were coming — I could see them coming. And so we yelled that there’s a baby who needs help, and we got a blanket for it and wrapped the baby, and the ambulance came over and started trying to help the baby, but then left. And I guess that was because the kid was dead, because she was I think 10 months old or something like that. And the woman was on her cell phone sobbing to her husband to come quick, and it was really intense. On my way home, my phone rang from everywhere. Everywhere and everywhere. My friends from Switzerland were calling me... So I just left a message that ‘I’m fine, turned my phone off, it’s a little much, but I didn’t get hit.’ It was really insane.” WHAT WAS RECOVERING FROM THE EVENT LIKE FOR YOU? “I had a lot of nightmares, and I still do every once in a while. I usually don’t talk about it, just because it’s so gruesome that people don’t really want to hear about it. I feel like a Vietnam vet or something having gone through a battle. It’s pretty terrible. And when I think about it, I think back on these images and it doesn’t really seem real, like a dream, something that happened to somebody else, or a movie that I saw.” DO YOU HAVE ANY SENSE OF OTHER PEOPLE’S EMOTIONAL RECOVERY? “I think a lot of people wanted to reach out and talk to each other, not necessarily what happened but how they felt, and I think that helped a lot of people recover a lot. Some people were really angry that either the city or the whatever, whoever they thought, people would lash out and go on tirades about how it would have been so preventable. But now, nobody really talks about it. It seems like it’s been dealt with as much as people are willing to deal with it, and now it’s filed away.” DID THE MARKET CLOSE FOR A WHILE OR DID YOU TAKE TIME AWAY? “The market never closed and I was back the next week. They had a minute of silence and people walking the street trying to respect the dead, but the market never closed. It definitely has never recovered. It’s busy, and it’s still the busiest market, but I would say it lost at least 15 to 20 percent \[of its clientele\]. Families are just starting to come back. You didn’t see a mother pushing a stroller for a long time. Because, I mean, those stories were horrible. The woman whose baby got hit, she was buying fruit apparently, holding her baby’s hand, and it just got taken right out of her hand. Those are some pretty visceral images, especially for mothers.” Do you hang out in santa monica other than going to the farmers’ market? “I prefer Venice because it’s a little more funky, but I do like Santa Monica — they’ve got some great restaurants. My favorite restaurant in Santa Monica is possibly Jiraffe.” WHAT’S YOUR LEAST FAVORITE THING ABOUT SANTA MONICA? “Parking sucks. What else... I don’t hate homeless people, but I hate that there are so many of them.You find hardly any in Venice, but in Santa Monica, I guess it’s ‘cause they feed them there at the steps of the thing. I mean somebody’s got to feed them, but it seems like they are the home of the homeless.” WHAT’S YOUR FAVORITE THING ABOUT SANTA MONICA? “My favorite thing about Santa Monica would probably be the people. I mean, they’re nice. At the markets especially they know what they want, they’re connoisseurs of quality, and they don’t mind paying for it. Whereas at other markets you’ll get people saying,‘This is too much’ and give you a really hard time, but \[Santa Monicans\] just seem like they’re into it to get the highest quality of produce, and I love that. You see mothers with their babies, and they all look so healthy and happy, and you know it’s because of what they put in their bodies and the choices that they make in their lives. I like the progressiveness of the city. It’s a city with a conscience — The People’s Republic of Santa Monica. I like that, I really do like that. It’s priced me right out of the rental market, but I like it.” *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on July 17, 2006.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/071706.pdf?ref=smdp.com)