They honored Ethan Wong’s life on a sunny day, twelve days after his death.

It was private. Only those invited by Wong’s parents came. This was not a school-run candlelight vigil or a makeshift memorial next to 7-Eleven. This was his true memorial service for the people whose lives he had touched most.

It happened on the 8th of November at the Lima and Campagna Sunnyvale Mortuary. A drawn-out sadness filled the room as guests dressed in black filed in. The service began, and the tears that had been falling so much the past few days began to fall again. At the end of the ceremony, everyone in the room had a chance to speak.A man and a woman began to tell their story.

He is an MVHS parent and she is a nurse. On the morning of Oct. 27, they are both driving down McClellan Rd.

They see the accident happen through the windows of their car.

He is the second to get out. She arrives third.

They walk to a spot next to the railroad tracks and a drought-ridden percolation pond.

Ethan Wong is there. He’s been knocked off his bike after a collision with a big rig. He’s still alive. Barely.

The man and the woman watch helplessly as Wong’s life ends before their very eyes. They think, ‘What could we have done?’

Stephen Chang, an MVHS sophomore, spoke too.

The day of the accident, Chang is ready to present his chemistry project on nuclear reactions with Wong. He notices Wong was absent, which is odd, but he’s still absent the period after that, and the one after that.

He eventually realizes the truth.

Chang recounted at the service that Wong had been the kind one, the smart one, the one who always had a snappy remark. Kuo-Wei Chang listened to his son. He had not even known who Wong was until his son came up to him the day of the accident and told him that Wong had been his good friend. At that moment, it dawned upon Kuo-Wei Chang that, this could have happened to anyone of MVHS’s 2,373 students. Hit by the stark grief of the service, he realized that he had to try to make sure this did not happen again.

“One is too many,” Chang said. “One already is hard to swallow.”

As the city of Cupertino recovers from Wong’s death, City Council members, parents and students strive to cooperate to make the city’s roads safer.

Chang had never been too involved in Cupertino politics. With his new involvement, he was introduced to a group of Cupertino parents ready to make change. Connected through the app WeChat, people voiced their opinions to decide what complaints to take to the Public Safety Commission. But underneath the productivity lay anger and grief. The City of Cupertino soon announced there would be a special community workshop on Nov 6. The parents only hoped they would be heard.

For Cupertino’s Director of Public Works Timm Borden, the aftermath of the accident has been, to say the least, stressful. He has received hundreds of comments from Cupertino residents that demand change. He carries out his regular duties. He has to put aside his own emotions for the betterment of the community. He needs to help think of a solution, and fast.

But Borden knows that the answer cannot be to dwell on the finger-pointing of the incident.

“It doesn’t do a lot of good to look backwards,” Borden said. “Let’s all as a community look forward.”

On the day of community workshop, 250 people crammed into the Cupertino Room of the Quinlan Community Center. The people present seemed like a cross-section of Cupertino itself — young and old from all backgrounds were there. At 7 p.m., chairs scraped against the floor as mayor Gilbert Wong began the event with the Pledge of Allegiance.

After an introduction, Santa Clara County Sheriff Captain Kenneth Binder stepped up to speak. He informed the audience that he could  not release many details about the investigation yet.

“We’d rather get accurate information out than quick information out,” Binder said. “We believe that the family, Mr. Ethan Wong and the community deserves that.”

To complete the report, the Sheriff has activated the STARS (Sheriff’s Traffic Accident Reconstruction Specialists) division, which will reconstruct the scene of the accident using advanced forensic technology.

Still, some people at the event believed they had waited long enough to speak to the city themselves. Parents asked for a chance at the podium too and did not want to sit and listen.

Rather than allow this potential commotion, the city continued with an alternate plan. After the official speeches, the City divided everyone into small groups. For about an hour, people went into discussions as they wrote down their ideas on how to prevent future accidents on pieces of poster paper. Then, everyone congregated and shared their posters as a community.

For the city as a whole, the event was a huge victory. The ideas had brought the community together as a whole.

However, for the parents, those ideas on the poster paper had been just that, ideas. To be converted to actual policies, they still had to reinforce their ideas to the City Council.

But at City Council meetings, the number of attendees dwindled from 250 to less than ten. Still, Chang found a way to go to his software company job in the day and fight for traffic policies at night. He and a few other parents attended all meetings to make sure Ethan Wong’s death did not go in vain.

Chang wants to put their cause for traffic safety through the MVHS PTSA to make their appeal more official to the city, as the city’s previous energy has withdrawn.

“The memory will fade over time. People will start to feel like [an accident’s] not going to happen again,” Chang said. “The next thing will strike, and they’ll be like ‘Let’s do it!’ But it’s already another loss.”

On December 16th, the City will hold a public meeting at City Hall to reveal the formal investigation report and what changes will be made in regards to the accident.

As the deadline approaches, the call for change that was so potent the week of Wong’s death has resurfaced. A record-high 400 people arrived to the City Council Plaza on the night of December 2nd. Parents against school traffic problems rallied in the courtyard as the rain poured. Inside City Hall, people presented their concerns to City Council.

The crowd only left at 3 a.m. Despite distractions, Cupertino will not let the matter of Wong rest.