The enablers

Part 3 of a three-part series

As if road deaths in U.S. could be made funny, artist Woodrow Phoenix once sketched a comic book titled “Crash Course: If You Want To Get Away With Murder Buy A Car.”

The words “get away with” unfortunately and accurately describe the outcome in many, if not most, deadly motor vehicle collisions in the U.S. and especially those involving vulnerable road users.

That this has somehow escaped the attention of the nation’s mainstream media or of all those funds, foundations and interest groups interested in saving lives – you know, the one’s daily warning about how climate change could kill us all in future years – is rather mind-boggling.

Every day in this country, cars and trucks reduce by about 120 the number of people who need to worry about tomorrow’s global warming because they are dead.

Too many of the dead happen to have done nothing wrong only to find themselves in the wrong place at the time when a motorist decides to devote less than full attention to his or her operation of a potentially deadly weapon.

New York Jets assistant coach Greg Knapp was one of those who died this way. He was innocently pedaling a bicycle in what he thought a perfectly safe bike lane in California on a pleasant day in July 2021 when a car entered the lane, ran him down and killed him.

San Ramon Police concluded his death was the fault of an inattentive driver, but two months later announced that on the advice of the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office, no charges would be filed against that driver.

“The DA’s office followed up with a public statement late Friday morning, as news of its decision began to grab headlines nationally with news and sports media tracking the case,” the Pleasanton (Calif.) Weekly then reported. 

“Bicycle fatalities are devastating events,” the statement said. But prosecutors “determined that there is insufficient evidence to satisfy the requisite standard of criminal negligence on the part of the suspect driver. The dangers of distracted driving are well known; to truly promote road safety, motorists need to be attentive drivers as well.”

Protecting bad drivers

The treatment of the Knapp-cased driver, a man who faced no consequences and whose name was even kept secret to protect him from any public blowback, surely came as a surprise to Knapp’s family and friends but not to those familiar with the deaths of vulnerable road users across the country.

The statement by the Contra Costa DA reflected a national law enforcement view that motorists should be advised to drive safely but protected from any significant legal consequences when they fail to do so.

In Tallahassee, Fla., where many pedestrians were dying on the streets last year as they were in Anchorage, local prosecutor Jack Campbell explained to WCTV that a driver being negligent isn’t enough to constitute a crime even if the driver kills someone.

“You’re still responsible financially, so there’s a disincentive to it,” he told the TV station. “I can be sued because I was driving, but it wasn’t to the point that we want to put you in jail.”

Among those killed in Tallahassee prior to Campbell’s explanation of how deadly collisions are handled was a Florida State University doctoral student riding a bike when struck by a motorist running a red light. The unnamed motorist was cited for disobeying the red light, nothing more.

Because the cyclist was dead, he was left with no way to pursue the “financial compensation” suggested by prosecutor Campbell. And his death attracted little news coverage.

Deaths like these seldom do unless the number of bodies becomes so great that the deaths can no longer be ignored, as happened in Tallahasee and Anchorage, or a high-profile individual happens to be involved, as was the case in South Dakota in 2020.

South Dakota Attorney General Jason Ravnsborg was that year at the wheel of a vehicle that veered off the highway onto the shoulder and struck a man walking there. Ravnsborg claimed he went to back to see what he’d hit, found nothing, decided it must have been a deer, and then drove off, leaving the man to die.

Investigators eventually charged Ravnsborg with three misdemeanors, something rare in deadly collisions like this. He pled no contest to two and walked away with a $1,000 fine, which generated some unusual outrage in the Midwestern State.

The Argus Leader reported the head of the state’s Department of Public Safety was so angered by how state attorneys handled the case that he sent a letter to the leadership of the state House dcelaring that in his opinion and “in the opinion of the highly trained highway patrol officers involved in this investigation, Mr. Ravnsborg should have been charged with 2nd Degree Manslaughter.”

But when South Dakota Public Media dug into the Ravnsborg case, it discovered that the attorney general had actually been treated more severely than any other sober drivers who struck and killed a pedestrian in the period from 2016 to 2020 in the Mount Rushmore State.

The norm

“Ravnsborg,” it reported, “was among at least 31 other drivers who were not legally intoxicated when they accidentally hit and killed pedestrians during this time period.

“Twenty of these drivers – or about two-thirds of them – were not charged with any offense or crime related to their driving. The remaining 11 drivers were cited for traffic offenses or charged with low-level misdemeanors.”

What South Dakota Public Media didn’t do after making this discovery was dig through all the other reports of deadly collisions from 2016 to 2020 to see if any of the drivers let off with even lesser consequences than those faced by Ravnsborg were equally or more so responsible than he was for killing someone.

Why not?

That’s hard to say, but as Ravnsborg’s attorney observed, small or non-existent penalties for bad driving are “exactly what I would expect. That somebody’s not intoxicated, and those accidents happen, then there are those low misdemeanors to take care of it.”

His statement reflected a view common in legal, law-enforcement and media circles across the country.  All have largely stopped referring to deadly crashes as “accidents” since the Associated Press, a once-powerful American news organization, in 2016 frowned on that reference.

The AP “Style Guide,” a bible for most journalists as late as a decade ago, advised the stenographers who now cover crime in this country to use “crash, collision, or other terms” in the place of “accident” to accurately reflect that most such events are predictable and preventable.

Law enforcement with media-relations departments often staffed by former journalists, followed the AP’s lead in changing how these deaths are reported. But collisions in which people die are still treated by both law enforcement and the media as if they were accidents rather than that which they are as a matter of law:  homicides.

Shoddy investigations

When 48-year-old cyclists Matt Glover from North Pole was killed while riding along the Richardson Highway near the city of Fairbanks in the fall of 2022, the Fairbanks Police Department conducted a quick and dirty “accident” investigation that portrayed him as a cyclist “who came out of nowhere” to put himself in front of a GMC pickup.

“I found the bicycle had no light attached either to the front or the rear,” Detective Ace Adams wrote in his report. “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 never found the rear light because little effort was put into searching for it. Glover’s front light, meanwhile, was found by his widow when the FPD returned to her the bike, clothing and other belongings collected at the scene of Glover’s death.

The headlight on Glover’s bike, his widow said, appeared “to have been sheared off his handlebar as the base was broken and unable to be reconnected to the mount.”

How the light later found in an FPD evidence bag could have been missed by Adams is unknown. So, too, how FPD missed the observations of the first individual on the scene after the crash, Dirk Taylor, because Taylor had some interesting things to say.

“Matt always rode safe,” Taylor said. “I saw him every weekday at near the same spot on his bike while I was driving to work. He always had reflective gear and lights on his bike, front and rear. It was a clear crisp morning. No fog, no snow coming down.

“I’m a professional truck driver. I’m not a cyclist. (But) from my POV, there’s absolutely no way the driver should have not noticed the bicyclist.”

The FPD investigative file on Glover’s death contains no interview from Taylor or from 66-year-old Fred Aker, the driver of the truck.

“(He) stayed in his truck the whole time except for about 45 seconds when he came to tell me (Glover) ‘came out of nowhere,'” Taylor said.

Aker would later tell this reporter that as he prepared to merge onto the highway where Glover was killed, he was focusing on his truck mirror rather than the road ahead. He said he “bent down to look and about four seconds later I heard a big thump. (I) immediately stomped on the brakes, looked up, and Mr Glover was flying through the air as his bike rolled out across the fog line.”

Four seconds with your eyes off the road has been described as “distracted driving.” Forty-nine states banned texting as a common and dangerous form of distracted driving after a federal study found that, on average, texting drivers took their eyes off the road for 4.6 seconds, enough time to cover the length of a football field at 55 mph. 

None of this information was in the FPD’s two-page-plus-one line report on the deadly collision that killed Glover.  Aker said he was never asked to provide a written statement of what happened, and there is nothing in the FPD report to indicate he was ever seriously interviewed.

The investigation, as with others like it, would appear to have been conducted with a preconceived intent to clear the motorist involved of any responsibility. This would be in line with FPD’s failure to report the deadly collision as it normally would with a media statement.

These usually appear after such deadly collisions, although they also usually provide precious little information, and the drivers are almost never named. In the Glover case, Aker’s name was uncovered only after FPD complied with a state freedom-of-information request from this website.

FPD is to be commended for that. Similar requests to the Anchorage Police Department regularly seem to disappear into a blackhole, and that, too, appears to be something that happens around the country.

None of your business

While recently in Idaho looking for a route for a long bike ride, I found a 50-miler on the Ride With GPS website that looked to be interesting. It looped into the flatlands south and west of Boise before swinging around the one-time farming community of Kuna and returning.

The route followed Boise’s fairly extensive system of bike trails out past the city’s airport onto rural roads and into a variety of the bedroom communities that have sprung up around Idaho’s hub for tech. Most of these new developments featured quiet neighborhoods with shared bike/motor vehicle routes marked through them.

Most of the rural roads connecting them were straight with great sight lines, light traffic and responsible drivers who passed a cyclist as they would another motor vehicle by moving into the opposite lane, which was a pleasant change from Alaska where so many drivers seem to think giving a cyclist a foot of space is more than enough.

Anchorage has a law requiring three-feet, but APD has never enforced it so it might as well not exist. But back to Idaho.

Near Kuna, I arrived on Black Cat Road where what had been a pleasant ride changed quickly. After a couple of dangerously close passes, I decided it wise to turn off Black Cat in search of road with less traffic and more responsible drivers. A later search for information on the road would reveal Facebook posters warning that Black Cat is a rat-run that local drivers use to get to the I-84 freeway four or five miles to the north as fast as possible.

This might explain the freeway-like speeds on a stretch of two-lane asphalt and the reluctance to tap the brakes to slow enough to let an oncoming car pass a cyclist so that the opposite lane could be used for a safe pass.

Further investigations into Black Cat Road eventually led me to this:

“A 67-year-old man has died after being hit by a car while riding his bicycle in Kuna. According to Ada County Sheriff’s Office (ACSO), the incident happened on N. Black Cat Rd. between N. Big Tree Ln. and W. Kuna Rd., Sept. 13 around 2:30 p.m.

Public pressures

Some traffic deaths appear downplayed from the start in an apparent effort to keep them from attracting the sort of public attention that put the Boulder (Colo.) Police Department under pressure to bring charges against a driver who killed a cyclist there.

The dead Boulder cyclist was 17-year-old cycling star Magnus White, a member of the United States Junior Men’s National Cycling Team riding in his Stars-and-Stripes team jersey when run down and killed on the shoulder of a highway through Boulder just days before he was to leave for Glasgow, Scotland for a July 2023 competition.

There was no way to keep his death quiet, and in the weeks and months that followed, local police and district attorneys were put under increasing pressure to take some action against the driver.

Five months after White’s death, they charged 23-year-old Yeva Smilianska with vehicle homicide. In May, she pled not guilty to the charge and, according to Colorado Public Radio, is using the car-did-it defense with a claim the steering malfunction on her 2004 Toyota Matrix.

This defense has worked for others.

After 26-year-old Pedro Quintana-Lujan ran his truck head-on into a string of cyclists in a bike lane in Goodyear, Ariz., in 2023 – killing two and injuring 17, several seriously – he claimed the steering on the truck had caused the accident.

That was good enough for Maricopa County District Attorney Rachel Mitchell to declare the evidence in the case “not sufficient to obtain a felony conviction” and dismiss charges the Goodyear Police Department had filed against Quintana-Lujan, CBS 5 News in Phoenix reported more than a year later.

The National Transportation Safety Board investigated that collision and could find nothing wrong with the truck. Its Feb. 2023 report said the “probable cause” of the deadly crash “was the pickup driver’s diminished state of alertness, likely due to fatigue. Contributing to the severity of the bicyclists’ injuries was the pickup driver’s speed and lack of response once the crash sequence began.”

After Mitchell refused to charge Quintana-Lujan, Goodyear city officials decided to lodge misdemeanor charges against him, but his attorney was in court earlier this month arguing to have those charges dismissed because “our client didn’t do anything intentionally or knowingly or recklessly,” ABC 15 in Phoenix reported.

“Unfortunately, it’s a civil traffic accident where a number of people, good people, were seriously injured or even killed.”

This is the same view of deadly collisions found reflected in the Knapp case, the Ravnsborg case, the Glover case and hundreds of others across the country.

In New York in 2021, prosecutors refused to file charges against a woman whose Mercedes-Benz was estimated to be going twice the speed limit when it hit and killed a New York deliveryman before crashing into an outdoor dining structure.

“…The sudden acceleration of the vehicle and subsequent loss of control cannot be adequately explained and may have been due to a mechanical defect, as had been reported by other drivers with that make and model vehicle, or it may have been attributed to driver error,” District Attorney Melinda Katz said in a prepared statement. “In any event, there is no credible evidence upon which to base a criminal prosecution.”

Well, none other that, in Katz’s words, the death “may have been attributed to driver error,” and the American legal system is set up so juries can decide when these “may haves” conflict.

Interestingly, New York police had originally blamed the crash on the driver possibly suffering a “medical emergency,” the New York Daily News reported. 

Attorneys for the deliveryman’s survivors later found a videotape that contradicted the DA’s claims as to what happened, which led Streetsblog NYC and others to investigate the crash and discover that speeding appeared to be the norm for the vehicle involved and that its owner ran a detective agency of the sort normally staffed by retired police officers.

But it doesn’t appear to take connections to police officers to avoid charges in deadly vehicle collisions.

Across the country on the West Coast, a Portland driver was in December handed a careless driving ticket after running down and killing a 75-year-old man in an incident the Portland Police Bureau described this way:

“Unfortunately, the pedestrian died at the scene. The driver remained at the scene and is cooperating with police.”

Cooperating with police is a good idea after killing a pedestrian or cyclist because it usually helps to minimize or eliminate any consequences for bad driving.

A citation for careless driving in Oregon is generally “a Class B traffic violation that carries a $300 fine. If your driving leads to an accident, the fine is elevated to $600 and the offense is a Class A traffic violation,” according to the website of Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers.

The charge is not, however, as serious as “reckless driving,” which is, in Oregon, a criminal charge that could result in up to a year in jail.

Alaska has no careless driving law, but it does, like Oregon, have a reckless driving law that calls for charging motorists with recklessness when their behavior “constitutes a gross deviation from the standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe in the situation.”

Anchorage police decided driver Russell Webb was within the “standard of conduct that a reasonable person would observe” when he ran down and killed retired dentist Carlton Higgins in a crosswalk in 2023.

At the time, APD put out its boilerplate media announcement saying, as most do, that “the truck driver remained on scene and cooperated with authorities…and no charges were filed.”

Six months later, thanks to the reporting of Paxson Woebler at The Alaska Landmine, it was revealed that the driver of the truck, Webb, had been cited, but ony for failure to yield to a pedestrian in a crosswalk. 

APD defended this action by telling the Landmine that 25 drivers had been cited for that offense between Jan. 1 and Dec. 6, 2023, and the treatment Webb received was no different from that the other drivers received.

“These cases all had similar fact patterns,” the APD statement said. “The only difference is that nobody died. There is no law in Alaska that says if you commit a traffic infraction and cause injury or death, then that is per se criminal negligence. The driver in this case was treated the same as all these other cases.”

Well, except that the cases didn’t have “similar fact patterns.” There was one huge difference. Webb killed someone. Apparently, no one died in the other 25 cases, though the Landmine never followed up to see how badly injured the victims in those wholly unreported collisions.

World-leading danger

And people wonder why the roads are so unsafe in a country where law-enforcement authorities can’t recognize the difference between a driver near-missing a pedestrian in a crosswalk and killing one.

American roads have now become so unsafe that researchers studying “avoidable mortality” in the U.S. and other high-income countries made note of this fact in a report published in the peer-reviewed journal JAMA Internal Medicine this week.

“…Between 2009 and 2021, avoidable mortality increased in all U.S. states, primarily due to increases in preventable deaths, while it decreased in comparable high-income countries,” they wrote.

“Avoidable mortality in U.S. states between 2009 and 2019 was mostly due to increased avoidable deaths from external causes (eg, traffic collisions, homicides, suicides, and drug- and alcohol-related deaths).”

The U.S. has waged a long-running war on drugs and has a federal agency – the National Institute on Acohol Abuse and Alcoholism – aimed at reducing deaths from alcohol and drug abuse. State and local governments run suicide hotlines and suicide-prevention programs to try to reduce suicides.

And murder homicides, which kill about half as many people as traffic collisions, are vigorously investigated and the perpetrators actively pursued in an effort to reduce future deaths.

Traffic deaths, however, continue to be treated as if they were “accidents,” those historically unavoidable acts of God beyond human control. 

A few deadly collisions probably fit this definition, too. Brakes do sometimes fail. Pedestrians sometimes make bad decisions trying to cross streets and jump out in front of a motor vehicle that can’t be stopped in time.

Most deadly collisions, however, are the result of bad driving, something Americans have increasingly made more acceptable with an overwhelming majority of them now believing. according to the American Automobile Association polling, that it’s OK for them to speed, drive distracted, and drive “distracted and aggressive” in urban areas where people concentrate.

They admittedly don’t want the other drivers on the road with them doing this, but figure they’re safe enough in their steel cages that they don’t have to worry about the collisions that kill tens of thousands and drivers and their passengers every year.

As for those vulnerable road users, who cares? They shouldn’t be near the roads anyway.

Correction: This is an edited version of the earlier story. The original version misidentifed a spokesperson for the Boise Sheriff.