Families of Bay Area traffic crash victims turn grief into action
New group will support victims’ families and advocate for safety measures
Julie Mitchell was paralyzed by grief for the first two years after her son’s death, a time she now says is mostly a blur. Twenty-one-year-old Dylan Mitchell, a star athlete who was an inspiration to his younger brothers and friends, was starting a career as an electrician, following in the footsteps of four generations of Mitchells. He landed a coveted apprenticeship. But on May 23, 2013 he never made it to work. Dylan was struck and killed by a garbage truck driver while commuting on his bicycle in the Mission in the early morning hours.
“I couldn’t really handle very much emotional stress in any way, other than just dealing and grieving his death,” Mitchell says of those first few years. Dylan was the one person she could really talk to, the positive and optimistic force in her life. His death, she says, destroyed her family. Alongside her grief she thought a lot about doing something to prevent the same nightmare from devastating other families. Earlier this year she felt like she had regained some strength and decided to act.
An official from the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) mentioned a group in New York City called Families for Safe Streets and it piqued her interest. Born out of grief and a determination to get change on the streets, the group of 150 families has been pushing for safety measures and supporting families experiencing trauma since early 2014. Mitchell then found out that Walk San Francisco, the city’s pedestrian advocacy organization, had been trying to form a local chapter of Families for Safe Streets.
“When this came up, I was like, this is it, this is what I’m supposed to do,” says Mitchell, who lives in Clayton with her husband, Paul, and their other three sons, Robert, Dusty and Matteo. “I wanted to do something where I could take my grief and turn it into positive action to help save lives.”
Mitchell became the leading founder of the group. The mission of San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets will be to fight for a shift in attitudes that “puts personal driving convenience over the safety of people’s lives,” says Mitchell. Families of victims and crash survivors are joining together to change the cultural acceptance of traffic deaths and injuries, often written off as “just accidents,” or the human cost of having cars on the streets.
The group launched Sunday, with a march and vigil to San Francisco City Hall as part of World Day of Remembrance for traffic victims.
In the immediate aftermath of Dylan’s death, the Mitchell family had no idea who to call, or where to get information. “We were just so lost,” says Mitchell. The police weren’t helpful and she says they blamed Dylan. Her husband tried calling San Francisco Police and other agencies to try and get answers but was told because it was Memorial Day weekend no one was available. It was confusing and frustrating. Mitchell wanted the driver held accountable for her son’s death. She wanted justice.
“The police didn’t do much of an investigation,” she says. “Nobody really had any good answers for us as to exactly what happened that morning.”
It took a while for the family to get answers and they didn’t come from the police. They hired their own attorney who concluded the driver failed to use his blinker before making a right turn onto South Van Ness Avenue from 16th Street. Mitchell believes her son thought the driver was going straight so he continued biking through the intersection and was run over when the driver made the turn.
Mitchell says the driver was never issued a citation. “There were no repercussions whatsoever. We felt there was no justice.”
San Francisco Bay Area Families for Safe Streets will raise the profiles of families who’ve lost loved ones to traffic violence as a way of building support for safety measures that can save lives. It will bring “a human voice to the demand for changing our streets,” says Natalie Burdick, Walk San Francisco’s Outreach Director.
The chapter will support families but not act as grief counselors. Similar to the New York group, which has a buddy system, the Bay Area organization has put together a list of counseling and family grief resources, and will be available to talk to families just experiencing a loss, including to those who don’t speak English.
In San Francisco, an average of 30 people are killed by drivers every year and 200 people are seriously injured, according to the SFMTA. The group will also push for safety measures, with automated speed enforcement at the top of the list.
It’s still too difficult for Amy Cohen to talk about the crash that claimed the life of her 12-year-old son in Brooklyn, New York three years ago. Sammy Cohen Eckstein was killed in his Park Slope neighborhood by a driver in a van on October 8, 2013. Cohen described Sammy as smart, confident, self-assured and careful: “He knew how to cross a street.”
Before Sammy’s death Cohen and her husband were advocating for safe streets as members of Transportation Alternatives. The family was featured in a Los Angeles Times piece in 2008 on the state of cycling in New York. Sammy, a “little pipsqueak of a kid,” managed to finish the TA’s annual century ride. “It took him all day but he did it,” she says.
When the family visited London before Sammy’s death, they got a chance to see some of the city’s 20 mph speed zones. “Sammy just thought that was so cool.” If only the driver who killed her son had been going slower, Cohen says, Sammy might still be alive.
Cohen was part of a group of families that co-founded New York Families for Safe Streets. Their first political victory was getting New York City to lower the citywide speed limit to 25 mph. They were also successful at boosting the number of speed cameras on city streets from 40 to 140. They are now pushing to get cameras installed near more than 2,000 schools as part of the Every School campaign.
Cohen has been offering encouragement and support to the new Bay Area chapter of Families for Safe Streets. She says connecting with other families has been “a life saver.”
“Nobody should have to go through this alone. It’s unimaginable to lose a child,” Cohen says, her voice breaking. “It’s an incredibly painful experience and it’s entirely natural to feel guilty and alone.”
Changing a car culture that prioritizes auto throughput over the safety of people might seem like a tall order, but the families and survivors of traffic violence have powerful stories to tell, and their movement is growing. There are chapters in Portland, Oregon and Long Island. The Bay Area chapter is the first in California, according to Burdick of Walk San Francisco. Groups are also forming in Boston and Los Angeles.
They hope to make reckless driving socially unacceptable in the same way Mothers Against Drunk Driving made drinking and driving unacceptable.
“It’s an understanding that we as a society should drive more carefully, that everybody should drive like their child is the one in the crosswalk,” says Cohen. “Everybody can be slightly inconvenienced to save a life. That’s what we’re fighting for.”
At Sunday’s World Day of Remembrance vigil, advocates, victims’ families and survivors encouraged other victims of traffic violence in the Bay Area to contact them. Their number is 415–431–9255, 1# and more information is available on their website.
Says Mitchell: “If you’re tired of the victim blaming, the unacceptable excuses, the lack of penalties for distracted or reckless driving, if you want to see lower speed limits, better road design and strong enforcement for dangerous driving, this is your call to action.”
