JACKSON HEIGHTS — Mourners gathered Monday to honor Ovidio Jaramillo, a 17-year-old killed by a hit-and-run driver last week, as family members begged the driver to come forward.
The pews at St. Joan of Arc church were filled as Jaramillo's body was brought in a baby-blue casket carried by friends and family, including his father, Ovidio Jaramillo.
The teen was coming home from a friend's grandmother's funeral on Dec. 8 when a driver hit him as he walked across Junction and Northern boulevards, police and friends said.
The driver of the black Toyota Camry kept going.
Jaramillo's grief-stricken grandmother stood outside the funeral on Monday and urged that person to turn him or herself in.
"I want to see you, I want to talk to you," Laura Valle said outside the church. "You kill my grandson. I can't imagine someone would just walk away from a child."
Friends gathered after the funeral for Ovidio Jaramillo, who was struck and killed by a hit-run driver on Dec. 8, 2015. (DNAinfo/Katie Honan)
Some friends — many who went to St. John's Prep with Jaramillo — held signs filled with photos and messages for him and wept alongside family members and neighbors as the casket was slowly wheeled down the aisle of the church.
Monsignor Otto Garcia, who led the bilingual mass, leaned heavily on the family's faith.
"Ovidio's death teaches us that life is two things — precious and fragile. It can end at any moment," said Garcia, who was joined by priests from St. John's Prep and other nearby parishes.
Garcia said Jaramillo — who loved sports and DJed on the side, and was known as "DJ Venom" at parties around the city — had fulfilled God's mission in his short time on Earth.
Through faith, his family and friends could trust that the teen was in a better place, a paradise without pain, where "there will be no more cars that can threaten us," he said.
A woman holds a sign with photos honoring Ovidio Jaramillo outside his funeral at St. Joan of Arc church in Jackson Heights. (DNAinfo/Katie Honan)
After the mass Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras-Copeland, who has helped the family organize the funeral arrangements, said she's working with the Department of Transportation on ways to improve the deadly intersection.
"Vision Zero has already been planted on Northern Boulevard, this corner has proven that it's not enough," she said.
Ferreras-Copeland said she understood the pain of Jarmaillo's friends.
When she was 15, her two best friends were struck and killed at Northern and Junction boulevards on Memorial Day weekend after going out to buy hairspray.
The driver was drunk and also fled, but crashed into the 115th Precinct just blocks away, she said.
She's drawn on the painful experience before, when 3-year-old Olvin Jahir Figueroa was killed at the same intersection in 2013. And she said she'll continue to push to find ways to make the streets safer.
"No one, and I lived through this, no 15, 16, 17-year-old should be burying their best friends," she said.
