The late Matt Glover in his standard riding kit with lights front and back on his bike, an OSHA-certified reflective vest on his body, and a Specialized Prevail helmet with a built-in rear light on his head just in case/Recompose

Evidence now points to victim-blaming effort

The Alaska State House of Representatives on Thursday joined the state Senate in endorsing the idea of naming a Fairbanks-area bike path after dead cyclist Matt Glover.

Nobody bothered to ask how Glover died.

They should have because the Fairbanks Police Department (FPD) investigation into his death appeared to paint him as an irresponsible, unlit cyclist who “came out of nowhere” along the Richardson Highway to collide with a truck, leaving the driver of that vehicle –  66-year-old Fred Ruskin Aker – severely traumatized.

Why would the state of Alaska be naming anything after someone like this?

Probably because friends – of whom Glover had many in Fairbanks – have described the cyclist as one of the safest and most responsible ridera in the state, a man who when riding in the dark always wore a highly reflective vest and rode a bike with a bright headlight in front and a bright taillight in the rear.

As friend Deb Lipyanic, who witnessed the consequences of the collision told Alaska legislators earlier this year, “I saw a crumpled bicycle on the shoulder and my heart immediately sank to the pit of my stomach. I very much did not want to believe that it could be such an intrepid rider (as Glover). After all, Matt was doing everything right; he had reflective gear/clothing, bike lights and headlamps, and he rode the shoulder.”

The contrasts between what friends of Glover have said about the cyclist and what the FPD officially reported as his behavior on the day of his death are so starkly different that they cry out for an investigation into FPD’s handling of the investigation of Glover’s death.

When the details of the FPD investigation were first reported here last month, they raised obvious and unavoidable questions about the collision at the junction of the Badger Road on-ramp and the Richardson Highway at 5:34 a.m. on Oct. 13, 2022 that led to Glover’s death.

Those questions have become much bigger since Ariane Glover, Matt’s widow, revealed this:

“When FPD returned the (crash-scene) evidence to me, Matt’s headlight was included. It appears to have been sheared off his handlebar as the base was broken and unable to be reconnected to the mount. But the light on the front of the bike in the photo you included in the article was the same light my husband was riding with on the day of the accident. It was critically important for his commute to be able to see road debris in front of him to avoid flats, in addition to being a safety measure for visibility to oncoming traffic.”

What headlight?

Strangely, there is no mention of a headlight in the FPD reports or investigation into the collision and only a minimal mention of some fabric that might have come from Mr. Glover’s safety vest.

“I found the bicycle had no light attached either to the front or the rear,” Detective Ace Adams wrote after completing his investigation.  “I did see what appeared to be a mounting bracket for a light on the back rack of the bicycle, but no light was on the bicycle or at the scene.”

Adams did not stop there, however, in trying to portray Glover as a cyclist hard to see.

Adams went on to report that the streetlight coverage of the intersection was poor and that “I also found there were no standard reflectors mounted to the bicycle. There were reflectors on the front and back of each pedal, and there was a small amount of material on the two back cargo bags which appeared to be reflective.”

Adams, for some reason, did not mention the headlight mount still clearly visible on the handlebar of the bike when it was returned to Glover’s widow or the possibility that the bike might have had a headlight.

Headlight mount/Photo courtesy Ariane Glover

And Adams made no mention of the highly reflective vest that Mr. Glover was wearing, reporting instead that “his clothing had been turned over to his wife,” or of a trunk bag with a highly reflective strip of 3M reflective material that had been mounted on the bike before the crash.

There is also no mention in any FPD reports that Mr. Glover was wearing what the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) classifies as a “Type 2” safety vest, which by law must display “no less than 201 square inches of reflective striping across the vest.”

These are the sorts of vests required of road construction workers, school crossing guards, surveyors and others. They are not required of cyclists, but Glover wore one anyway for safety. It is the vest he is pictured wearing in the photo at the top of this story.

The late Mr. Glover had it on when he left home on the morning of the collision that would cost him his life, but his widow never got the garment back.

“Matt’s clothing was cut off at the hospital and disposed of. When I contacted (the hospital) about retrieving his clothing, they said it was put into the trash and they wouldn’t check their dumpsters, assuming they were already emptied,” she said. “I was hoping FPD could follow up with the ER and get a better response than I received. That would be another suggestion for policy change around a crash: hospitals should have a procedure to retain items, such as clothing, found on patients brought in from motor-vehicle collisions or other potential crimes or investigations involving law enforcement.”

FPD, however, did have access to plenty of witnesses – among the paramedics and hospital personnel – who could have testified as to what the late Mr. Glover was wearing when hit.

His widow did get back her husband’s helmet, reflective over mitts, and the Jandd trunk bag that had been attached his bike’s rear rack before the collision. “For after-dark safety,” Jandd advertises on its website, there’s a strip of 3M Scotchlite Reflective Material at the rear of the bag with an unattached section where a clip-on light can be positioned.”

“The items provided to me from the hospital were bagged and I left them in my car before flying on the medevac to Anchorage with my husband,” Mrs. Glover said. “I had a friend, who is a retired FPD officer, pick up the items and deliver them to one of the FPD detectives on the case.

“Before they delivered the items, I had another friend photograph things that would be turned over to FPD. The photo my friend took only showed the front of the helmet and, until last night, I had not opened the sealed evidence bag I retrieved from FPD following the investigation.

“However, after reading (your) article, I wanted to provide you with a photo of the rear view of the helmet because my husband had a light on the back of his helmet. That provided two points of visibility from the rear lights, one on his rear rack/trunk and one on his helmet. However, as you can see in the photo, the light is missing. I didn’t realize this prior to last night. Again, I suspect the light dislodged and shattered (or shattered and dislodged) from his helmet at impact, and likely mixed with other road debris that was not retrieved the morning of the crash.”

Matt Glover’s helmet with the round, empty hole showing where a safety light was mounted before being knocked loose in the collision that killed him/Photo courtesy of Ariane Glover

Standard law enforcement practice is to maintain an evidence log detailing materials collected during an investigation. A request for the evidence log from Mr. Glover’s crash was among a list of questions about his case emailed to the FPD spokeswoman on April 22. She did not respond.

A second request on April 24 also went unanswered, but Fairbanks Police Chief Ron Dupee on that day emailed a request asking for “contact information for Mrs. Glover.  The number we have is not correct.”

Mrs. Glover was subsequently asked by this website to get in touch with the chief, which she reported she did. After she had done so, Dupee was asked for answers to the questions earlier sent the FPD spokeswoman – among them one asking how the detective investigating the collision could miss the front light that ended up in the evidence bag and the reflective vest.

That email has also gone unanswered.

On the day Mr. Glover was hit, Fairbanks police officer Andrew Wixon did report the cyclist was wearing a helmet, but did not mention that it was or had been equipped with a rear-facing light.

Wixon was the first patrolman to arrive at the scene of the collision. He also reported giving Aker a field sobriety test during which the driver “failed the walk and turn (WAT) and one-legged stand (OLS) test, but based on the totality of the circumstances I did not believe he failed due to impairment.

“My observations (were that) he failed both the WAT and OLS test due to balance issues. If I took away the poor balance, which accredited (sic) to being distraught from hitting a bicyclist that he would have passed the test.”

When a blood test later turned up oxycodone in Aker’s system, FPD investigator Robert Hall dismissed the drugs as an insignificant matter “based on the observations of Mr. Aker at the scene of and immediately following the MVC (motor vehicle collision), there were not visible indications of impairment.”

Hall somehow overlooked Wixon’s report of an obvious “visible indication,” that being Wixon’s report that he watched Aker fail the walk-and-turn test and the one-legged stand test.

It is possible, as Wixon concluded, that Aker failed these tests because he was distraught over killing a vulnerable road user. It is also possible Aker was distraught at the realization he’d just run over someone he obviously should have seen. And it is possible he was impaired by the drugs he had taken.

Dismissing evidence

There is no indication that FPD went back after the drug test results came in to ask Aker what dose of oxycodone he had taken before the accident and if so when. FPD has not responded to a question as to whether Aker was re-interviewed after the accident and if not, why not.

Hall wrote that he dismissed the oxycodone in Aker’s blood based on information compiled by the New Zealand Independent Expert Panel on Drug Drive. It recommended a blood level of 20 ng/mL for automatically ticketing drivers for impaired driving in that country.

Aker was reported to have had 7.0 ng/mL of oxycodone in his blood when tested, but the FPD reports do not indicate how long after the collision the blood draw took place. That is an important time element in cases like this.

‘The half-life of oxycodone in the blood ranges from three to six hours,” the New Zealand report warned. “It is eliminated quickly compared with some other opioids.”

The New Zealand report also noted that although 20 ng/ml is the standard limit for mandatory ticketing, “the blood concentrations found in seven impaired drivers ranged from 10 to 140 ng/mL. Blood oxycodone concentrations detected in six hospitalized drivers ranged from 10 to 300 ng/mL (mean 90 ng/mL, median 50 ng/mL).

How long after the accident Aker was tested is another question FPD is not answering. It is clear, however, that the test was not immediate.

“I asked Aker if he would go with me to the Fairbanks Memorial Hospital for a blood draw, and he agreed to,” Wixon wrote. It is only about a 10-minute drive from the Badger Road-Richardson Highway intersection to the hospital, but Wixon wrote that the blood test there didn’t take place immediately upon arrival.

“Once at FMH and after some confusion about the implied consent that I had, I advised Aker of the implied consent warning and the consequences if he refused to provide a sample of his blood for law enforcement. After being advised of this, Aker agreed to allow his blood to be drawn….

There are other questions unanswered here.

The FPD has not answered why the obvious headlight mount on Mr. Glover’s bike was not mentioned in Adams’ report. FPD has not answered a question as to whether any effort was made to search the road for remnants of crushed plastic taillights from Mr. Glover’s bike in the wake of the collision.

FPD has not answered how long the Badger Road-Richardson Highway intersection was closed so that a thorough investigation could be completed as is done when collisions between motor vehicles lead to life-threatening or deadly injuries.

FPD has not provided a report from “Officer Sean,” who is mentioned in Officer Wixon’s report as having “talked to a witness who showed up on the scene…(and) had seen him biking into Fairbanks before.” FPD did not respond to a question as to what that witness might have said about how visible the late Mr. Glover.

FPD did not respond to a question asking if any efforts were made to find other witnesses who might have seen the late Mr. Glover on the Richardson immediately before the accident to clarify whether he and his bike were visible or could have been the dark object Aker claimed came out of nowhere.

Photos of Mr. Glover’s bike would indicate it was hit from the rear at an angle of 30 degrees or less.

The rear view Matt Glover’s/Photo courtesy of Ariane Glover

Given the reflective vest, Mr. Glover was wearing, he should have been visible from the rear even if his taillight and the light on his helmet weren’t working.

Mrs. Glover said she is still struggling to understand how it is possible her late husband could not have been seen.

“I asked FPD about obtaining the driver’s cell phone records very early on via phone call and they said that they ‘didn’t have probable cause’ to do that,” she added in an email. “I can’t think of any more ’cause’ needed than a driver hitting a cyclist while merging into traffic on a straight stretch of an on-ramp that has no physical obstacles to visibility, at a point on the ramp when the driver had to be at or near highway speeds.

“I’ve driven the route myself and I cannot understand the physics of what happened, as the max probable speed of my husband’s bicycle and the speed of the driver would have placed the driver’s headlights behind my husband at some point; it would have lit my husband up light a Christmas tree when the lights hit the wide reflective stripes on his vest. I know this because I’ve passed my husband in my car on the shoulder in the dark before.

Sadly, no one in the Alaska Legislature asked about that due diligence in this or other cases across Alaska. Legislators were happy to virtue signal their willingness to protect vulnerable road users by naming a few miles of bike trail for the late Mr. Glover, but none have shown any willingness to question Alaska law enforcement about the sometimes shoddy investigations or non-investigations of such collisions.

When 13-year-old Zakkary Mann was left bleeding and broken after being rundown on Brayton Drive, a specifically designated “bike route” in Alaska’s largest city in 2022, his mother couldn’t even get APD to look for the hit-and-run driver who sent hear child to the hospital. Shana Mann eventually turned to local television station KTUU to plead for public help in identifying the hit-and-run driver.

The result was a bunch of comments on the story blaming Zackkary for being out too late, not wearing high visibility clothing and mainly just being on the service road that offered the best route from South Anchorage’s Get Air Trampoline Park to his home less than a mile north.

As for the bike route designation, the state Department of Transportation later said those are meaningless, and the situation seems to be the same with Alaska bike trails and sidewalks.

When a truck hurrying to enter a gas station in North Pole ran over and killed 13-year-old James Johnallen Walters in 2012, the teenager was blamed for riding on the sidewalk, and no charges were filed against the driver of the truck. 

North Pole police Sgt. Bill Bellant explained to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner that Walters had “crossed the path of a truck pulling into the entrance to the Badger Road Tesoro station.”

This has become the Alaska norm. As with the young Walters, so too with the late Mr. Glover. If a vulnerable road user is killed by a motor vehicle, it is presumed it was the cyclist or pedestrian’s fault unless it can be definitively proven it wasn’t.

And even when it is definitively shown that a driver was responsible, as was the case in Anchorage where 82-year-old Carlton Higgins was run over and killed while in a marked crosswalk intended to protect pedestrians, there are no real penalties. The driver who killed Higgins was fined $100 for failure to yield, The Alaska Landmine reported in February.

So let no one wonder anymore why Alaska roads are so unsafe for those who venture near them without being surrounded by the safety of a steal cage, although in many cases not even that can save you.

Correction: This is an updated version of the original story. It was edited on May 4, 2024 to reflect that the late Mr. Glover’s reflective vest was thrown into the garbage at Fairbanks Memorial Hospital rather than being placed in an evidence bag.