Downtown Coeur d’Alene/Wikimedia Commons

Pedestrian killing driver charged in Anchorage

Coeur d’Alene, Idaho – The strange part about walking around downtown in this very conservative Lower 48 city is that motorists actually seem to understand state traffic laws.

Step into the intersection of any two streets and most drivers will stop to let you cross. Why?

Because Idaho, like Alaska, has a law that specifies that all intersections are “crosswalks” where motorists are legally required to yield to pedestrians whether the crosswalks are marked or not.

This is probably the most ignored law in the country in most places in which it exists.

In Anchorage, the municipal code defines a crosswalk as “the portion of a roadway an intersection included within the connection of the lateral lines of the sidewalks on opposite sides of the street measured from the curbs, or, in the absence of curbs, from the edges of the traversable roadway and, in the absence of a sidewalk on one side of the roadway, the portion of a roadway included within the extension of the lateral lines of the sidewalk at right angles to the centerline.”

Elsewhere in the code, crosswalks are specifically referred to as “marked” and “unmarked,” as in 9.20.040, which stipulates that “every pedestrian crossing a roadway at any point other than within a marked crosswalk or within an unmarked crosswalk at an intersection shall yield the right-of-way to all vehicles.”

These “any point other” pedestrians would be the people Anchorage drivers like to refer to as “jaywalkers.” Local social media is full of motorists ranting about jaywalkers and how they should use crosswalks.

Those same motorists, however, render the use of many if not most Anchorage crosswalks a waste of time because 98 of 100 motorists, if not more, ignore the law on unmarked crosswalks.

Most act is if they are unaware municode 9.20.020 stipulates that “when traffic control signals are not in place or not in operation, the driver of a vehicle shall yield the right-of-way, slowing down or stopping if need be to so yield, to a pedestrian crossing the roadway within any marked or unmarked crosswalk.”

In Anchorage, a pedestrian is lucky if a car stops to allow the use of a marked crosswalk. An unmarked crosswalk?

Yet another death

There are indications the latest pedestrian to die in Anchorage’s now-record year of pedestrian deaths was in one such crosswalk.  The Anchorage Police Department (APD) reported on Friday that it “responded to 34th Avenue and C Street in reference to a vehicle versus pedestrian collision.

“The preliminary investigation revealed that a Jeep Gladiator was southbound on C Street when it struck an adult male pedestrian. The adult male pedestrian was transported to a local hospital where he was pronounced deceased.”

APD didn’t specifically say that 57-year-old Fred Mosquito was in an unmarked crosswalk. It is possible he could have been on C Street just north or south of where such a crosswalk would exist, but the victim-blaming APD, in its very brief and typically information-lacking report on his death, failed to suggest the collision was the fault of a jaywalker as the agency has often suggested to be the case.

This is how APD has handled other recent deaths:

The late Crystal Anvil, 38, was reported by APD to be “crossing the westbound lanes of West Northern Lights Boulevard, approximately 500 feet to the west of the crosswalk at the intersection with Minnesota Drive, when she was struck by a westbound Kia SUV,” the agency reported on Sept. 21.

The late Ambrose Aguchak, 79, was reported by APD to be “crossing the northbound lanes of the New Seward Highway, approximately 500 feet south of the crosswalk at E 36th Avenue when he was struck by a Subaru” and died on Sept. 20.

The late Kaycie Martin, 24, was reported by APD to have been killed “by an SUV around 3:45 a.m. (on Sept. 13) while crossing Minnesota Drive near 34th Avenue. Police say Martin was crossing outside of a crosswalk.”  

(Why the APD reports “police say” in a statement on the official site of “APD News” is beyond me, but maybe some reader can figure it out.)

Whatever the case, this pattern of blaming pedestrian deaths on people trying to cross the road somewhere other than at an intersection is an APD norm. APD regularly points this out as if pedestrians stuck outside of crosswalks are fair game for motorists.

And at least once last year,  they reported this out-of-crosswalk behavior even when a witness to the collision said the pedestrian was in the crosswalk when hit by a sport-utility vehicle.

APD officially claimed 65-year-old Redzebije Imeri “was walking southbound across Benson, not in a crosswalk, when she was struck by a Dodge SUV being driven eastbound on Benson.”

After a woman posted on the APD Facebook page that she’d witnessed the accident, I tracked her down to find out what she’d seen. This is what she said:

“So what happen(ed) was the guy was over speeding. 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 (I) were scared. The old lady was not a jaywalkers. The news sucks! It’s sad. He should be in jail.”

This information was relayed to APD with a request for more information on the deadly collision and predictably, as is the agency’s the norm, there was no response.

More than a year later, however, unnoticed by almost everyone, including me, the APD topped that old post about Imeri’s death with this:

“On August 8, 2024, 69-year-old Martin J. Richards was charged with criminal Driving While License Revoked (DWLR).”

Flaunting the law

There appears to be a lot more to the story than that one-line summary.

Richards’s driving has over the year helped him compile a rather thick court file. He has been previously ticketed for failing to yield, failing to signal, failing to register his car, driving without a license and repeatedly for driving withou a license.

DWLRS (driving with license revoked or suspended) would appear to be a charge with which Richards is all too familiar.

State court records show he was charged with the offense in 2003, pled no contest and was fined $1,000. Two years later, he was again back in court on a charge of DWLRS and again offered a no contest plea.

This time the judge fined him $6,100, but Richards was not deterred.

In 2006, he was yet again caught driving without a license and this time without insurance as well. He again pled no contest to DWLRS, and, according to the court records, got off with a fine of $1,600. He was required to wear an electronic monitoring device for some time, but for how long is unclear in the online state records.

Two years later, he was again caught driving without a license and without insurance. The state dismissed the latter charge and allowed him to plead no contest to the charge of driving without a valid license.

What sort of sentence Richards received in that case is even less clear in the state court records than for 2006, but indications are he got an ankle monitor and a $510 fine on that occasion. Richards then went a decade without getting caught driving illegally.

Whether this is because he changed his behavior or just didn’t get caught, only Richards knows.

America is full of people who ignore the requirement for a license to drive and drive without one, according to the American Automobile Association (AAA). The group’s Foundation for Traffic Safety has reported about 20 percent of the fatal crashes in the U.S. – or about one in five – involve unlicensed drivers. 

That said, it does appear that despite all his previous misbehavior, Richards did get his license back because when he was stopped for an unsafe lane change in 2015, he was not charged with DWLSR. As with his other cases, he pled no contest to the bad driving charge and was fined $85.

He then generally stayed out of trouble until 2018 when he was charged with operating a motor vehicle under the influence (DUI), or what is commonly known a drunk driving, and leaving the scene of an accident, both misdemeanors.

Again the state agreed to drop the second charge, and court records reflect that Richards pled no contest to the drunk driving charge. This time it appears he went to jail, but court records are unclear for how long. He was also fined $3,155.

A first-time DUI in Alaska is a misdemeanor with a mandatory sentence of 72 hours in jail or electronic monitoring. Court records reflect that Richards was required to wear an electronic monitor, but are unclear on how much time he spent in jail before he was fitted with that device.

Toothless charges

This time, for killing Imeri, he faces another charge of DWLSR, a Class A misdemeanor for which there is a minimum sentence of imprisonment of not less than 10 days for someone previously found guilty of DWLSR. 

The maximum penalty for a Class A misdemeanor in Alaska is up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $25,000. But such sentences are rarely levied, especially in traffic cases.

Motonormativity – an unconscious bias that dictates a cultural “need” to drive, as illustrated by researchers in the United Kingdom – almost always prevails when it comes to the sentencing of motor vehicle drivers who kill. This was well documented after retired Anchorage dentist Carlton Higgins was run down and killed in an Anchorage crosswalk in August 2023.

After Higgins was killed, APD refused to say anything for months – as was the case with Imeri   – while the public speculated, on the APD Facebook page no less, that Higgins’ death was likely his own fault for illegally walking in front of a motor vehicle. 

Six months later, the Alaska Landmine discovered that Russell Webb, the driver of the truck that killed Higgins, had been ticketed for illegally hitting Higgins in a marked crosswalk.

Crosswalks painted on the asphalt are intended to double the safety for pedestrians by making it unmistakably clear they are at a place designated for pedestrians to cross and have the right-of-way.

Unfortunately, there is no real incentive for drivers to yield that right-of-way. Striking a pedestrian in a right-of-way is what is called a citeable offense, like a ticket for illegal parking.

For killing Higgins, Webb was written a ticket which cost him $100. The deadly crosswalk collision also put four points on his license, but that is rather meaningless in that a driver must accumulate 12 points to get in trouble with the state, which goes out of its way to try to prevent that from happening.

“Traffic law violators are sent a warning letter upon reaching the halfway mark towards a point suspension,” according to the Division of Motor Vehicles. “Violators are advised to take steps to correct their poor driving behavior,” or lower their point total by “completion of a defensive driver course (DDC). A DDC may be taken once every 12 months for a point reduction.”

With Alaska’s largest city having set a record for pedestrian deaths this year, the Anchorage Assembly is now talking about what might be done to make municipal roads safer, but there has been mention of more aggressive prosecution of drivers who kill vulnerable road users or of mandated, stiffer sentences for those who are prosecuted to send the message that running down a pedestrian in a crosswalk is going to cost a driver more than a day’s lift ticket at the Alyeska Resort just down the road from the state’s largest city. 

Meanwhile, MustReadAlaska – the state’s conservative news website – is trying to blame the record number of deaths on a decision by the progrssive Anchorage Assembly to do away with seldom-enforced jaywalking laws on the premise that on the rare occasion those laws were enforced minorities were targeted.

There is almost no evidence with which to support the latter conclusion an little evidence to support the former, although here is no doubt some of the pedestrians who’ve been killed in Anchorage have foolishly walked into traffic and died due to their own carelessness.

But the fact that death toll for Anchorage motorists and their passengers is higher than death toll for pedestrians, despite the motoring crowd being encased in steel safety cages, says about all that needs to be said about Anchorage road dangers.

This is not San Fransisco where The San Fransisco Standard reports the pedestrian kill is outpacing that of Anchorage 21 to 15 but with one big difference. Pedestrians there comprise about 64 percent of the people killed on Bay City roads.

The latest, five-year average body count for Anchorage shows that the majority of those who die on Anchorage roads, about 59 percent, are motorists with pedestrians accounting for about 36 percent and the other 5 percent being cyclists. 

It would be unusual if Anchorage pedestrian deaths reached half of the road-death total, but that could be possible this year. The number of pedestrian deaths is already well over the five-year average of 8.4, but the motorist death count for this year is not readily available. The average is 13.8, just below this year’s pedestrian count.

This is not, however, a lefty-right issue despite the view of MustReadAlaska. The deaths are largely due to the enablement of bad driving by like-thinking drivers on the both right and left.

No matter righties might like to think of themselves as more responsible and harder working than lefties, or how lefities tend to view themselves as the smartest people in the room, both view the roads of America as owned by motorists and if someone on foot or a bicycle gets in the way, well:

It’s their own damn fault!

As Richard Brandi, a historic preservationist in San Fransisco told The Standard, “Pedestrians jaywalk, walk drunk or stoned. Nothing is going to stop those accidents.”

As for San Fransicsco efforts to make roads safer, Nina Geneson Otis, a real estate broker, complained those things are unlikely to work “‘while the living have to suffer’…She added that her intention was not to victim-blame pedestrians hit by cars, but also that ‘pedestrians need to be more aware and respect traffic laws.'”

Those views from liberal San Francisco echo those from more conservative Anchorage, but then again, they all pretty much echo the national view that ensuring convenient travel for motorists is far, far more important than saving the lives of pedestrians.

Maybe the residents of this city, which seems in some ways more small town and remote than Anchorage, just haven’t caught up with the times. After all, a few bodies are small price to pay for convenience, aren’t they?