A 1916 photo of the Waco Horror that was allowed to happen because white people didn’t give a damn about black people/NAACP

The sad death of Carlton Higgins

Part I of II

The time has come to accept the reality of how pedestrians and cyclists – the people now known as “vulnerable road users” – are perceived and treated in Alaska and much of the rest of this country today.

The use of the N-word seems almost appropriate to generate the attention this subject deserves, but I’m going to be politically correct and just put it this way:

Vulnerable road users have become the black folk of the American transportation system, but not the black folk of today. They are the black folk of the American South of the 1900s when lynchings were frighteningly common and segregation was the norm.

Vulnerable road users are being killed at the rate of about one per hour, according to the Centers for Disease Control, because too many motorists feel about them the way Southern whites felt about blacks in the early 1900s.

Some motorists actually hate pedestrians and cyclists the way white Southerners hated blacks. There are a growing number of reports of pedestrians and cyclists being intentionally rundown by motorists.

But most motorists, as was the case with whites in the Old South, let the killing go on because they don’t care enough about vulnerable road users to see anything done about their deaths.

As a result, people like Carlton Higgins, an elderly Anchorage dentist die, are rundown and die because there is no reason for motorists to be concerned about running over them. Higgins was in a crosswalk theoretically intended to protect pedestrians when he was killed.

The driver was ticketed and paid a $100 fine.

And some wonder why the streets of Anchorage are so unsafe for vulnerable road users. Open your eyes. Look around. The story is playing across your windshield every day.

Motorists in Anchorage, as in some other parts of the country, regularly buzz pedestrians in crosswalks, force them aside to turn right on red lights, and close pass cyclists to figuratively show them who is the boss hog on the road.

And lo and behold the pedestrian who tries to cross an Anchorage street somewhere between the crosswalks, though this is perfectly legal in places where crosswalks are far apart as they often are in Anchorage.

Forget that. Many a motorist in Anchorage believes it is against the law to cross a street anywhere but at a crosswalk. They post this misinformation on social media sites all the time. Some also appear to believe it is their duty to do everything they can to try to scare a pedestrian or cyclist into the idea they shouldn’t cross a road anywhere but at a crosswalk.

If you are a vulnerable road user who hasn’t had a motorist step on the gas to accelerate toward you upon seeing you on the pavement in an intersection lacking a crosswalk, you haven’t done much walking or cycling in the state’s largest city.

These accelerations usually appear to put said drivers well over the speed limit on city streets, but speed limits on Anchorage’s non-highway streets are rarely enforced as are the other laws supposedly intended to protect vulnerable road users in this city.

A motorist blows through a red light on Anchorage’s Northern Lights Boulevard/Craig Medred photo

Unenforced laws

The same can be said for laws against running red lights and close-passing cyclists, which is technically illegal in Anchorage. The municipality long ago stipulated that “the driver of a motor vehicle overtaking a bicyclist proceeding in the same direction shall pass to the left at a safe distance, not less than three feet, and shall not return to drive on the right side of the roadway until safely clear of the overtaken bicyclist.”

But it appears the law has never been enforced. The Anchorage Police Department (APD) has repeatedly declined to disclose how many tickets it has issued for this offense. Alaska Court System records, however, indicate the number is zero.

Failure to yield to a pedestrian in the crosswalk is also illegal in Anchorage. APD has written tickets for that, but there are now strong indications that the only time a driver is ticketed for this is when a vulnerable road user is maimed or killed.

The maiming is what happened with U.S. Nordic Team skier Hannah Halvorsen in downtown Anchorage in 2019. She was left in hospital with a skull fracture, a bleeding and bruised brain, a fracture tibia fracture, and the MCL and PCL ligaments in her knee torn loose from the bone. APD for weeks refused to say how a candidate for the U.S. Olympic Team had been nearly killed on the streets of Alaska’s largest city. 

It was more than a month before Beth Bragg – a dogged, old-school reporter now retired from the Anchorage Daily News – managed to hound APD into revealing that Halvorsen was hit by an “80-year-old woman driving a Jeep west on West Seventh Avenue (who) stopped at a stop sign before turning south on L Street, where she hit Halvorsen. The driver was cited with failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk.”

The driver’s name has never been revealed.

On Sunday, reporter Paxson Woelber at The Alaska Landmine revealed that failure to yield to a pedestrian was the penalty imposed on the driver of a Ford F-250 truck who ran down and killed Higgins as he was crossing Anchorage’s Piper Street in a crosswalk in August.

APD has refused to disclose that driver’s name, too,  in clear violation of the state public records law, but this is the norm.

APD is of the view that as long as a vulnerable road user is in or near a roadway and dies due to the bad driving of a sober driver, the death is as the agency explained to Woelber “an unfortunate event, but not criminally negligent.”

Or, in plain language, sober motorists can kill with impunity so long as they hang around to act like they regret the death and “cooperate” with the “investigation,” if one can call APD’s cursory examinations of road death investigations.

The deaths of vulnerable road users are certainly not treated like death investigations. When their bodies are found on the roadway,  they are treated little differently than road-killed moose.

The collision is no one’s fault. It’s an accident. And if it is someone’s fault – as in breaking the law that is supposed to protect pedestrians in crosswalks – it is still an accident. Woelber admitted he was surprised APD was willing to admit to this in the case of Higgins because the agency usually tries to avoid talking about the deaths of vulnerable road users.

There could be a good reason for this failure to communicate.

According to a November report from the Alaska Highway Safety Office in the Alaska Department of Transportation and Public Facilities, the “Anchorage Municipality had 220 vulnerable road user fatalities and serious injuries (62.9 percent of the statewide
total), the largest in the state by far” in the period from 2016 to 2021.

That works out to about 37 fatal or serious injuries every year. APD told Woelber that 25 drivers had been cited for failure to yield in Anchorage last year. He did not ask how many of those citations involved a vulnerable road user left dead or maimed, but the number of citations is so small in relation to the average number of fatal and serious injuries it would seem likely most if not all of the citations involved a death, as in the case of Higgins, or a maiming as in the case of Halvorsen.

Exactly how many vulnerable road users are maimed in Anchorage each year is hard to ascertain because, as APD spokesperson Sunny Guerin explained in an email asking for more information on a serious 2022 collision, “we don’t release victim ID unless they die as a result of their injuries or are charged with a crime.”

Often these serious, non-death collisions go wholly uncovered by the city’s legacy media, which largely counts on APD to do its reporting. The injuries to Olympic caliber athlete Halvorsen were not reported by APD and would have gone unnoticed in Anchorage but for the fact that when an athlete of her caliber is so busted up so badly she can’t compete the sports community notices and wonders what happened.

Whether Halvorsen was blamed by AP for getting run over is unknown, but victim blaming is another Anchorage norm. APD told Woelber that one of the reasons for Higgins’ death was that he didn’t look both ways before entering the Piper Street crosswalk. How APD determined this is not clear.

But the victim blaming fit a pattern.

After 38-year-old Kasey Turner was run down and killed on Brayton Drive in 2018 an APD spokeswoman blamed “visibility and road conditions” for his death and explained to the Anchorage Daily News (ADN) that “Turner was partially in the roadway and not on a sidewalk, and he was wearing dark clothing. Pedestrians should always utilize sidewalks or keep as far away from the main road as possible.”

Brayton, like many streets in Anchorage, has no sidewalks. “Partially in the roadway” would appear to indicate he was walking as close to one side of the road as possible. The driver who killed Turner has never been named. Whether the driver was ticketed is not known.

Neither the ADN nor any other local news organization followed up on the story, another norm, and even if they had, APD is so normally uncooperative in responding to requests for information on collisions involving vulnerable road users that such efforts would likely have been a waste of time.

I have an email folder full of unanswered APD emails. When the Community Relations department doesn’t like questions, it simply doesn’t answer them.

Nameless, faceless, dead

All available evidence has now made it clear to me that the preconceived notion of APD upon arriving at the scene of the body of a vulnerable road user lying in the street is that an “unfortunate event” has happened, and that’s it.

Woelber’s reporting helped me understand why APD never responded to a query about the July death of 65-year-old Redzebije Imeri, another pedestrian. Of her death, APD originally reported it had “responded to a vehicle versus pedestrian collision near the intersection of Minnesota Drive and Benson Boulevard.  Initial indications are that an adult female was walking southbound across Benson, not in a crosswalk, when she was struck by a Dodge SUV….”

But that is not what a witness to the accident told me. What the witness said was this:

“So what happen(ed) was the guy was overspeeding. And hit the woman. And he almost hit my car too. He ran over the woman. For like a second it was sad, and I was screaming coz he killed her. And I left the scene coz we’re scared. The old lady was not a jaywalker. The news sucks! It’s sad. He should be in jail.”

The witness’s comments indicated Imeri might well have been in the crosswalk only to have her body driven out of it by the impact of the collision. So after the second non-response from APD asking for more information on the crash itself was ignored, I sent this email:

As is often the case with  APD community relations, there was no response.

After the agency ignored the email, I spent some time trying to find friends or family of Imeri in Anchorage to see what APD might have told them, had no luck, decided the death of a 65-year-old woman with no easily established Anchorage connections and a foreign-sounding name was something easily tossed in APD’s circular file, and decided after a few days that I had better things to do than waste more time with APD’s non-responsive public information staff.

So I moved on to other stories and was shocked when Woelber wrote about the Higgins fatality and actually got APD to respond to a story about a pedestrian being killed. Marc Grober, an Anchorage and road safety advocate in Anchorage, spent months trying to get APD to tell him what happened to 16-year-old cyclist Taylon Soto who was run down on the corner of Tudor and Baxter roads on his way home from the Benny Benson Secondary School in 2019.

Grober got nowhere.

All that was ever known of that case was the boilerplate APD statement before the story was made to go away; “The preliminary investigation found that the bicyclist was on the northeast corner of the intersection of Tudor Road and Baxter Road and the driver of a red 2015 Dodge Caravan was traveling westbound on Tudor Road. The adult female driver struck the juvenile male bicyclist at the intersection. The driver remained at the scene and was questioned by officers.”

The city’s legacy media made no attempt to find out what had happened there, and there was predictably no follow up from APD on what became of their “investigation” of the collision.

In the propaganda-driven world of American government today, this is somewhat understandable. If a woman with kills a 16-year-old kid with her van and all you do is hand her a ticket, or decide it was the kid’s fault and write the whole thing off as an “accident,” there’s really on “positive” public relations to be found in revealing what you believe actually happened.

Hiding the truth from the public like this makes something of a mockery of the claim that the Department’s “mission is to protect and serve our community in the most professional and compassionate manner possible,” but it is in keeping with the motonormativity of the city’s largest political constituency.

All of which only added to my surprise when APD respond to Woelber’s questions about Higgins. Maybe it had something to do with the world of social media where the APD community relations staff appears to spend a disproportionate amount of its time trying to make APD officers look good and where the Landmine is highly active.

Maybe APD was worried the Landmine already knew about the $100 ticket for killing someone and would blow the Higgins story up on Twitter.

Whatever the case, Woelber’s reporting did help me to understand why APD didn’t seem interested in following up with a witness to the deadly crash that killed Imeri.

What’s the point if agency policy is that the only thing that happens is that someone gets a ticket? Why waste the time to track down and interview witnesses in order to write a ticket when there are real crimes that need investigation in Alaska’s largest city?

And who is going to care that a 65-year-old woman with no influence in the community got rundown anyway? Anchorage, like most American cities these days, is devoted to motor vehicles.

People who venture onto the roads on foot or bicycles should know they are doing so at their own risk and take proper precautions – recognizing, as Higgins should have, that it’s not the responsibility of motorists to avoid killing vulnerable road users but the responsibility of pedestrians and cyclists to somehow avoid being killed.

And there can be found the tip on an iceberg of a problem bigger than Anchorage or of Alaska, a problem that is everywhere in a nation that has spent billions of dollars on trying to make roads ever more convenient for motorists and motor vehicles every safer for their occupants while making the country ever more deadly for vulnerable road users while fueling the pandemic of the unfit that by the latest count killed nearly 1.2 million Americans.

Part II to come: We’re all responsible