A Pathetic Drunk Shatters Their American Dream The first two coffins were white. They carried the bodies of Dilcia Peña, the beautiful 16-year-old, and the 4-year-old boy, Andy. The third coffin appeared to be made of dark polished cherry wood, glistening in the torrid Brooklyn sun. Inside that single coffin were the bodies of Maria Herrera, 24, and the infant she was carrying in her womb when all of them started together across an American avenue Saturday evening, heading for home. "You don't think something like this can happen to anybody," said Victor Quijano, who came to Brooklyn from Puebla, Mexico, nine years ago. He was standing in the shade of a maple tree across 42nd St. from the church, watching the coffins being lifted from the Cadillac hearses. "Then it happens, boom, like that, to people you see in the street three times a week, good people. All gone. It's not fair." At a few minutes after 10 yesterday, the coffins were carried into St. Michael's at Fourth Ave. and 42nd St., a place of stained glass and marble and Byzantine mosaics. They passed a sculptured Jesus in agony on the cross and a large painting of the Virgin of Guadalupe. And behind the coffins came the relatives and members of these two families joined in Brooklyn, one from the Dominican Republic, the others from Guatemala. Hundreds of them. They filled pews. They glanced at Mayor Giuliani and some other political people. They listened to the language of consolation. "I told them," said Bishop Nicanor Peña, "that when bad things happen, only the Lord knows why." Bishop Peña, a small, grave man from Puerto Plata in the Dominican Republic, was there because he is an uncle of Maria Peña, who married Victor Herrera, and of Dilcia Peña, her sister. "I said that someday we will all be together again in paradise," he said. "Then we will know." Shattered Father Before the funeral Mass began, and before the coffins, Victor Herrera came across Fourth Ave. with family and friends, dressed in a black suit, his handsome coffee-colored face scoured by death. He seemed locked in an angry solitude. His wife was gone. His son was gone. His new baby was gone. It wasn't supposed to turn out this way. He came here to work, and like so many others in Sunset Park over the past 60 years — like the Irish and the Italians who were there before the Mexicans and Guatemalans and Dominicans — he worked and he worked and he worked. And now the people he loved had been gouged out of his life by a wretched drunk. It would have been obscene to ask him once more about his feelings, as if he carried with him a permanent script to be parceled out in sound bites. He had expressed his anger a few nights earlier, saying: "Mister, how would you have felt?" He had tried to do what private people never have to do: talk to the media. And had done so with angry eloquence. Now he was left alone among the hundreds who were trying to console him. And yet this is one of those events that can never have a true ending. Somewhere in the city, the cop named Joe Gray was dealing with the ruins of his own life. He will be arraigned today in a Brooklyn court and is facing long, hard time in prison. I hope the Police Department has seized his guns. Melting Memorial Five blocks from the church, at Third Ave. and 46th St., the spontaneous memorial to the dead was already decomposing. Votive candles, adorned with various images of Jesus and Mary, had cracked in the ferocious heat, leaving a magma of colored wax congealing on the asphalt. Flowers wilted. A pile of stuffed animals leaned at odd angles. A group of five Latinos arrived, and one man removed a baseball cap and kneeled in prayer. Four policemen stood together at a distance, looking sad. Above them all, racing on the Gowanus Expressway, cars and trucks rumbled like an ugly soundtrack. Down on Second Ave. and 39th St., the topless dive called the Wild Wild West was preparing for another day of business. A sign said, "You must be 23 with proper ID to enter." If Joe Gray and his pathetic fellow drunks drove down Third Ave. from the 72nd Precinct parking lot last Saturday, and a made a right on 39th St., they'd have passed metalworking shops and welding supply stores. At the corner, with Costco to the right, they'd have seen a marvelous view across the harbor of the New York skyline. They parked and went into a cheap dump that would make the Bada Bing look like the '21' Club. Now, where Joe Gray will surely go, he will have no view of the skyline or any view at all of women taking off their clothes. When he's gone, immigrants will still climb the stairs in the back of the Wild Wild West to visit the check cashing place. They will go to Mass at St. Michael's. They will work and work and work. And in all seasons, Victor Herrera will walk over to Green-Wood Cemetery, to the place where a part of his life in New York will lie buried forever.