Broken - Bicycling

by
David Darlington
Photographs by
Jeremy Harris
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Every time we take to the open road,
we entrust our lives
to a safety net of
legal protection
and basic human decency.
That system has failed.
Ross Dillon and his father Rusty, Oct. 2007. Ross took his last bike ride on June 3, 2002.
56
illustration by tK
c r e d i t
p h o t o
nence with the county’s other major cash
crop, cannabis sativa. As California Highway
Patrol officer Eric Nelson observes: “Those
back roads that are so wonderful to ride and
By almost any measure, Sonoma County should qualify as cycling heaven.
drive on were built for farmers in agrarian
Spanning more than a million acres from the Pacific coast to the Mayacamas
times, not for the [conditions] we have today.
Mountains, it has every kind of riding, from flat to steep to gently rolling, much
We’re driving 2000-model vehicles on roads
of it on lightly traveled roads through quiet forests, farmland and vineyards—a
designed in the 1920s, ’30s and ’40s.”
pastoral landscape that, blessed by a balmy climate, amounts to a paradise for
It was a 1997 Mitsubishi Mirage that
two-wheeled travel. That, no doubt, is why race organizers chose it for two stages
Cathie Hamer was driving at 2:45 p.m. when
of the 2007 Tour of California—the first one rolling up the coast and headshe turned off California 116 (the Gravening inland toward Santa Rosa on Occidental Road, the second passing through
stein Highway) west onto Occidental Road.
­Sonoma and Napa Valleys via Trinity Grade, an 8.2 percent slope of chaparral.
She was on her regular commute route from
In the United States, however, cycling heaven is a qualified concept. Five years
the town of Sebastopol, where she owned a
previous to the 2007 race, Ross Dillon set off on a June training ride that reversed
shop called Yin Yang Clothing—a boutique
the peloton’s eventual route. A 25-year-old Cat 3 racer who had ridden with the
that sells hemp garments, jewelry, incense
2007 TOC winner Levi Leipheimer on group outings from Santa Rosa, Dillon
and Eastern religious statuary. After stopwas spending the summer at his family’s home on Trinity Road before starting
ping off at the supermarket, Hamer was
his first year of law school at Boston College. Since graduating cum laude from
headed for her home in Duncans Mills, a
Santa Clara University in 1999, he had moved to the East Coast with his girlfriend,
tourist stop on the Russian River, which
­Katie, also a B.C. law student, whom he was now planning to marry in August. ­In
was a half-hour drive away. Occidental Road
isn’t the most direct or well-traveled route
­between these two points, but that is the reathe meantime, having saved some money from a job as an invest- son Hamer—and Ross Dillon—preferred it. As the road enters
ment clerk at Liberty Mutual, Dillon was taking the summer off the coastal hills to the west, it gets twisty and more hazardous,
to race and train, hoping to upgrade to Cat 2 with the Boston but in the stretch where Cathie Hamer began to overtake Dillon,
Bicycle Club in the fall.
it is one of the least challenging sections of pavement in western
“In races Ross would typically be third or fourth,” says his Sonoma County.
father, Rusty, who is also a cyclist, as well as a psychotherapist and
“The road there is straight and the shoulder is wide,” corAnglican minister. “He once told me that he thought he had too roborates Travis Bland, then a 16-year-old student who happened
wholesome a family background to be a really successful racer— to be driving behind Hamer on his way home from Analy High
he wasn’t angry enough.”
School. As Bland followed a few lengths behind Hamer at 50
“He was afraid of being hurt,” Rusty’s wife, Betsy, elaborates. miles an hour, he noticed that, for no apparent reason, her car was
“He wouldn’t go out and take risks.” Among his friends, Ross was starting to drift to the right, gradually entering the bike lane beknown for a funny and disarming, if stubborn, personality. When hind a cyclist up the road. “I thought maybe [Hamer] knew him
a low-intensity training ride turned into a hammerfest, Dillon and was trying to scare him,” Bland recalls. “I thought it might
would ride resolutely off the back. If somebody in the group was have been one of my classmates playing a joke on somebody.” He
acting like a jerk—being overly critical of riders, or telling every- could clearly see, though, that if the Mirage didn’t steer back into
one else what to do—Ross would pedal up alongside the authori- the road right away, it was on a collision course with the bike.
tarian and announce how honored he was to ride with him. That
At 2:50, Dale Killilea was standing on a deck at Plumfield
sort of thing made people laugh. Everybody would loosen up.
Academy, a school a half mile to the north, when he and a few
At about 12:30 p.m. on June 3, 2002, Betsy telephoned Ross of his fellow teachers heard a “large, ugly crash.” Although there
from her job tutoring children with learning disabilities. He told had been no screeching tires or blaring horns, they thought a sigher that he was going to ride his Land Shark into Santa Rosa, go nificant two-car collision had occurred. “[The sound] was so loud
to the bank and the bike shop, and be home for dinner by 6:30. In that you could feel it even where I was standing,” Killilea says.
between, he’d do a long ride out toward the coast, heading west
This “boom” also got the attention of Ken Fader, an oral surfrom Santa Rosa on Occidental Road.
geon who was headed east in his car on Occidental Road. TurnOccidental, a fast, semi-rural two-lane road, marks the geo- ing his eyes toward the source of the sound, Fader saw Hamer’s
graphic transition from eastern to western Sonoma County. ­Mitsubishi barreling through the grass on the other side of the
­Although the wine industry has given this area
a reputation for civilized gentility, Santa Rosa
(the county seat) is becoming a congested urban
”It was an awful thing to see,” says a witness of Dillon’s
grid, and the region’s wooded western reaches
accident. “It was bizarre—it was breathtaking. It seemed
are giving way grudgingly to different kinds of
outrageous, because the cyclist was not taking any risk.”
development. With the demise of dairies and
orchards, wine grapes now compete for promi-
Betsy, Rusty, Ross and his sister Jess at their Sonoma Valley home
The vehicle’s
windshield was
smashed, including a
10-inch “intrusion”
apparently
caused by
Dillon’s helmet.
results inconclusively, saying they’d partially changed color in a
chemical test.) Hamer gasped, telling Nelson that the bag contained “herbs” to help her quit smoking cigarettes.
Ultimately Nelson would conclude in his report that, just
before she ran into Dillon, Hamer realized she was on the last
straight stretch of Occidental Road before the miles of twists and
turns, decided to get something out of one of the grocery bags in
the back and, in the process, unwittingly steered onto the shoulder at 50 miles an hour.
In other words, it was just an accident. Hamer was distracted—she wasn’t impaired. Because she hadn’t killed Dillon, she
couldn’t be charged with manslaughter, and because she wasn’t
weaving or braking erratically, she couldn’t be charged with reckless driving. There was never any argument about who was at
fault; multiple witnesses testified that Dillon was in the bike lane.
It was just his tough luck to be biking on Occidental Road when
Cathie Hamer got hungry.
Dillon would remain in a coma for four months, a vegetative
state for 10. Two months after the crash, he underwent surgery
to drain fluid from his brain and repair a previously undetected
­fracture in his skull, after which he developed pneumonia and
septic shock. He was subsequently moved to a subacute pulmonary ward where his doctors remained pessimistic. During that
period, however, his parents began treating him with acupuncture
and, unknown to hospital authorities, smuggled an unauthorized
TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit into his
room, hiding it under a splint on his wrist to stimulate his brain
through his right arm—a treatment developed in North Carolina
by orthopedic surgeon Edwin Cooper, whose son happened to
be a friend of Lance Armstrong’s. Soon after that, Ross began
Dillon had been an
aspiring Cat 3 racer.
get reception in that area, and that she’d been looking directly
ahead. Finally, Nelson asked if she’d taken any medications or
drugs before driving, and she said she hadn’t. As her car was being
impounded, Nelson gave Hamer a ride home, during which he
concluded that she wasn’t under the influence of alcohol or otherwise impaired, though he didn’t administer any chemical tests.
When the ambulance crew arrived at Santa Rosa Memorial
Hospital, an emergency-room nurse told the operating room:
“I’m not sure you have a patient.” Dillon had catastrophic head
injuries—a member of the trauma team said he had the biggest
brain hematoma she’d ever seen—and his C-7 vertebrae was
broken, but his spinal cord was undamaged and, thanks to the
quick reactions of passersby and emergency personnel, he entered
surgery within 45 minutes of being hit. Over the course of his
ordeal, he’d stop breathing four times—immediately after the
crash, once in the ambulance, once in the operating room and
once in intensive care.
Betsy and Rusty Dillon didn’t learn about their son’s crash
until that night. When he failed to come home for dinner, Betsy
telephoned the Highway Patrol, which confirmed that a cyclist
named Ross Dillon had been involved in an accident. When Betsy
asked where he’d been taken, she waited for several minutes on
hold before learning the name of the hospital. (Later she realized
that the CHP office probably thought Ross was in the morgue.)
By the time the Dillons arrived at Memorial, surgeons had already
removed part of Ross’s skull to relieve the swelling in his brain,
and when Betsy first glimpsed him in the intensive-care unit, she
was overwhelmed. “One of his eyes was yellow and swelled up to
the size of a baseball,” she remembers. “They had him hooked up
to a bed that was moving him from side to side like a rotisserie.”
The prognosis was equally bad. The Dillons were told that
Ross would never be the same, and that they should prepare themselves for some very tough decisions. “People thought he might be
brain dead,” Betsy says. “When we got there, they started talking
to Rusty about donating Ross’s organs.” By the next day, Dillon’s
condition had stabilized, but he remained in critical condition and
in a coma. Six days after the crash, a neurosurgeon friend of the
Dillons rated his chances for future improvement at 5 percent.
Upon receiving all this news, Rusty telephoned Kate Moore,
a family friend whose son had grown up with Ross. “My beautiful
boy is broken,” he said.
One week after the crash, CHP officer Eric Nelson called
Cathie Hamer with a few clarifying questions. She told him she
had nothing new to add, and that her attorney would have to participate in any further discussions. Nelson said that he understood,
but also wanted to let her know that a “possible” bag of marijuana
and rolling papers had been found in the glove compartment of
her car. (The examiner who evaluated the material described the
ride smart
­ oving his head in response to voice commands, and on January
m
29 he mouthed his first word since the crash. As a tracheotomy
tube to his throat was being suctioned out and changed, Betsy
thought she heard him say, “Shit!”
Based on such unexpected developments, in March Dillon
was moved to a rehabilitation center in Marin County. Over
time, however, the insurance company judged his progress inadequate for continued coverage; treatment had been funded by
a COBRA policy he’d taken out upon leaving his job at Liberty
Mutual, but the designation of his condition as subacute meant
that professional nursing care was no longer medically necessary.
Rather than warehouse him in a facility without active therapy,
his parents decided to bring him home on June 7, 2003—almost
exactly a year after the crash. The Dillons thus became financially responsible for their son’s rehabilitation and equipment,
which would come to include a power wheelchair, a hospital bed,
a wheelchair-accessible van, a full-time live-in attendant, and
regular physical, occupational and speech therapy.
Cathie Hamer’s $25,000 liability insurance had likely been
used up by Ross’s emergency care before Betsy and Rusty even
learned he’d been in an accident. They later got a note from Hamer, “obviously concocted by her attorney,” to avoid any admission
of guilt, says Betsy. The letter said Hamer “couldn’t believe” what
had happened. At one point Hamer left the Dillons a tearful telephone message declaring, “You don’t know what this has done to
me.” Hamer’s husband sent the Dillons an e-mail saying there
hadn’t been a carefree day in their house since the crash.
“I used to believe the one thing worse than this would be if
Ross had done it to someone else,” Betsy admits. Still, she feels
there’s a difference between Hamer’s remorse and acceptance of
responsibility for what happened. Although it might seem like
splitting hairs, it doesn’t sit right with Betsy that Hamer never
simply said she was sorry. (Such a statement could be used against
Hamer in court if the Dillons filed a civil suit, but they say they’d
Here’s how to avoid the five most common bike-car collisions.
c o u r t e s y
road, debris flying behind it, a spandex-clad bike rider tumbling
in its wake. Then the car swerved back onto the pavement, heading right at Fader before correcting direction again and speeding
off to the west. Fader’s first thought was that he’d witnessed an
attempted murder. He likens it to a scene in a movie where an
assassin runs down a victim: “It was an awful thing to see. It was
bizarre—it was breathtaking. It seemed outrageous, because the
cyclist was not taking any risk. He seemed to be in as safe a place
as a cyclist could be.”
Thinking that the Mirage was fleeing the scene, Fader pulled
a U-turn to try to get its license-plate number. Meanwhile, Bland
had stopped to flag down other drivers, imploring them to call
911. He also terms the incident “unreal”—when he saw Dillon’s
legs flailing above the roof of the car, Bland was “surprised at the
height that he was thrown up into the air. It was like he was flying—but then when he hit the ground, he didn’t move at all.”
As Fader turned his car around to chase the Mitsubishi, he saw
Dillon in a motionless heap 50 yards from the first point of impact.
A trained emergency physician, Fader realized that the cyclist’s
survival might be hanging in the balance. “If he’d been conscious
he would have righted himself,” Fader says. “That twisted position would have been too uncomfortable.” Fader made a decision
to abandon the chase and instead administer to Dillon, whom he
found turning blue. Failing to detect a pulse, he repositioned the
cyclist’s head to clear his airway, taking care not to worsen any
cervical injuries; after he’d done this three times, Dillon coughed
weakly and started drawing shallow, raspy breaths. A few minutes
later, emergency technicians from local volunteer fire departments pulled up to the scene, responding to the 911 bulletin.
Unbeknownst to most of those present, Cathie Hamer had
stopped her car a hundred yards up the road. When officer ­Nelson
arrived at 3:02, he saw Hamer walking toward the spot where Fader and the firemen were attending to Dillon. Crying hysterically
and holding both sides of her head with her hands, she fell to her
knees as Nelson approached; when he helped her up, he felt her
legs wobbling. “What happened?” she kept asking, ­mucous flowing from her nose.
Nelson walked Hamer back to her car and told her to wait
there. He noticed that the vehicle’s right front and sides were damaged—its right windshield wiper had been torn off and the windshield was smashed, including a 10-inch “intrusion” apparently
caused by Dillon’s helmet. There was jewelry hanging from the
rearview mirror, a bunch of grocery bags in the back seat.
As Dillon was taken away in an ambulance, Nelson thought
he was probably a fatality. By the time Nelson returned to talk to
Hamer, she had calmed somewhat. “I was just driving along and
then there was this big bang,” she said. “I thought to myself that
I had been hit by another car. All I saw was black, and there was
glass flying everywhere. It all happened so fast. I just ended up
here, and I got out and that was when I realized I had hit somebody. Did you get any witnesses? Was he in my lane? I really don’t
know what happened. It just went black, and I guess now I know
that the black I saw was the guy rolling over my windshield.”
Nelson asked Hamer if she was aware she’d drifted onto the
shoulder before the crash. “I was just driving straight,” she said.
“Were you talking on your cell phone, or reaching for something in the car?” Nelson asked. Hamer said that her phone didn’t
LEFT CROSS
RIGHT HOOK
DOORED
PARKING LOTTED
THE OVERTAKING
A motorist fails to see a
cyclist and makes a left
turn­—it accounts for almost
half of all bike-car crashes,
according to the Pedestrian
and Bicycle Information
Center (PBIC).
Avoid it: If you see a car
turning into your path, turn
right into the lane with the
vehicle.“Don’t creep into the
intersection at red lights to
get a head start,” says Laura
Sandt, program specialist
for the PBIC.
A motorist passes a cyclist
on the left and turns right
into the bike’s path.
Avoid it: Passing stopped
or slow-moving cars on the
right places you in a driver’s
blind spot. Take the lane—
it’s your right in all 50 states.
“If you’re in the lane, the
driver will slow down and
stay behind you and wait
to make the turn,” says
Preston Tyree, who runs
the Community Mobility
Institute, in Austin, Texas.
A cyclist traveling next to
parked cars lined up on the
street strikes a car door
opened by the driver.
Avoid it: “Always be
looking several cars ahead,”
Sandt says. Ride at least
3 feet from parked cars,
taking the lane if necessary.
Be prepared to stop
suddenly. Keep your weight
over your rear wheel and
apply strong force to the
front brake lever, with
moderate force to the back.
A motorist exits a driveway
or parking lot into the path
of a bicyclist.
Avoid it: No bikehandling tricks can
overcome the danger of
riding on a road with
numerous parking-lot exits.
Just take a less-direct
route. If you don’t change
routes, follow the law and
ride fully in the road. Most of
all: Stay off the sidewalk—
motorists aren’t looking for
you there, Sandt says.
A motorist hits a cyclist
from behind.
Avoid it: “Make yourself
as visible as possible and
ride predictably,” Sandt
says. Use reflectors and
lights on your bike at night;
when moving to the left,
signal with your arm; and
hold a straight line while
checking traffic over your
shoulder, because even the
most diligent driver could hit
a swerving bike.
—Christine Mattheis
illustrated by Charlie Layton
abandoned that notion after learning that she had no assets.)
Part of the reason the Sonoma County district attorney’s ­office
declined to pursue charges against Hamer was its expectation
that a jury would identify and sympathize with her, a common occurrence across the country. In that light, Rusty unintentionally
describes not only Hamer and her spouse but also the American
populace in general when he says: “Their sorrow doesn’t seem to
be empathic. It’s always about how bad they feel.”
As cyclists we accept the fact that our pastime can be
dangerous. We recognize that riding among automobiles is a risk,
we know we’re the equivalent of sitting ducks, we’re aware that
drivers don’t pay much attention, we’ve seen cars do all kinds of
crazy things, and we’ve had our lives repeatedly threatened by
clueless or outright hostile jerks. Still, we pride ourselves on our
skills and instincts, confident that we’re alert enough to recognize
danger developing and sufficiently skilled to elude it. But none of
us has any defense against what happened to Ross Dillon. As the
now-22-year-old Travis Bland (who resorted exclusively to mountain biking after witnessing the crash) reflects: “The only thing
that might have helped him is if he’d had a mirror. But even then,
he would have had only a second or two to react.”
Dillon’s story is a nightmare, its lack of legal accountability an
abomination. But it’s only one of many such incidents that have
occurred throughout the United States. “Barely a week goes by
when you don’t hear of a cyclist being killed, the behavior of the
driver being outrageous, and the response of law enforcement or
the penalty passed on to the driver being woefully inadequate,”
says Andy Clarke, executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. “The kinds of crashes we’re talking about almost
­always involve a motorist who was hopelessly distracted or out of
control—speeding, taking corners as they shouldn’t, talking on
a cell phone, or reaching for a CD. Most are avoidable and preventable, but the response is so feeble. It’s an intensely frustrating
feeling of powerlessness.”
As with Cathie Hamer, the law—or, more accurately, the lack
of it—often stands in the way of penalizing inattentive drivers.
Gary Brustin, a California personal-injury attorney who specializes in bicycle cases, says that a typical response he encounters
among district attorneys is: “‘Give us some ammunition—some
teeth in the law.’ Juries are filled with people who aren’t cyclists,
and a driver’s behavior has to be far beyond negligent for a criminal case—there have to be aggravating circumstances to make it
vehicular manslaughter or murder. If there aren’t, [drivers] usually go to jail for less than a year, or get a suspended sentence.”
“When the intent is not there to kill or harm someone, the
offenses aren’t there to prosecute,” Clarke agrees. “When a cyclist
is killed by a driver who was text-messaging someone, you read as
much in the paper about how awful the driver feels. We’ve made
driving so easy, accessible and convenient—and the system is so
forgiving—that people can drive distracted at great speeds and
mostly get away with it. But we’ve seen conclusively that not paying attention will cause bad things to happen; studies have shown
that distracted driving is just as dangerous as driving drunk. We
take action
Here’s how to change laws, create an effective
campaign or advocacy group, and make
your community safer, more friendly—and more
accountable—to cyclists.
Find local friends
Don’t go it alone—like-minded enthusiasts make everything from
organizing to politicking easier. “Most cities have some kind of
bike-advisory committee or group that has a seat at the table when
you’re dealing with cities and local agencies,” says Andy Clarke,
executive director of the League of American Bicyclists. “It’s a
good idea to be involved with people who are already involved.”
Learn from the leaders
If no formal organizations exist in your area, or the groups seem
weak and unorganized, educate yourself by associating with
bigger nationwide or regional groups. Avery Stonich, marketing
and communications manager for the Bikes Belong Coalition
(bikesbelong.org), suggests taking cues from other successful
bike-advocacy groups. “Our organization provides support so
people don’t have to reinvent the wheel every time they want to
get involved,” she says. Here are a few groups that can be
consulted: League of American Bicyclists, bikeleague.org;
Thunderhead Alliance, thunderheadalliance.org; and Pedestrian
and Bicycle Information Center, pedbikeinfo.org.
Set goals
“Do your homework before you do anything,” Clarke says. Find out
what the bike laws are in your area and compare them with laws
nationwide. Determine your community’s needs and use them to
focus your goals. “Is it changing the law, or is it changing the
community’s culture?” Clarke says. Stonich urges aspiring bike
advocates to avoid frustration. “One of the challenges is that it’s a
slow process,” she says. “You can start work today and you might
not see results for several years.” If you want to create a relatively
quick change with measurable results, target one law that stands
out as the weakest in comparison with nationwide norms. A good
longer-term goal: the creation of a bicycle master plan for a city.
Network
Find out who pulls strings in your community: Who knows the mayor
or your congressional representative? Ask around—you might be
surprised to find out who has influence. Use any venue available for
getting face time with legislators. “Often all it takes is saying the
word ‘bicycle,’” Clarke says. “You’d be amazed how all of a sudden
people want to be on your side.” Even sending a handwritten letter to
a town VIP can make a difference. Attend public meetings about bike
or public transportation plans, or parks and recreation, Stonich says,
so you’ll stay on the minds of powerful people.
Be specific
When speaking face-to-face with a legislator, avoid being
overbroad. “The more open you are, the more room there is for
interpretation,” Stonich says. Instead of saying, for example, that
your city needs to be friendly to cyclists, request that bike lanes be
placed in a certain part of town, or that a city bike coordinator be
instated. “If you’re making a presentation and you just talk about
how bad everything is, it’s easy for your listener to cluck and say,
‘well I wish you all the best,’” Clarke says. “Ask for something
specific, and you’ll be hard to ignore.”—C.M.
should be penalizing those people the
inside the car with seat belts and air
same way that we treat drunk drivers.”
bags; we need to put an equal emphasis
Clarke observes that while cyclists
on protecting people outside the car.”
are uniquely vulnerable, society tolerThe Sonoma County Bicycle Coates traffic fatalities in general. “Dealition was founded in 1999 by Janice
spite seat belts, anti-lock brakes, air
and Mike Eunice, a retired librarian
bags, crumple zones and any number
and a high-school teacher who came
of silver-bullet devices, 43,000 people
to the area because they thought it
are killed in crashes in the United
“the best place in the world to ride a
States every year,” he says. “I worked
bike.” But after moving to Santa Rosa,
for four years as a highway contractor
the Eunices were disheartened by what
for the Federal Highway Transportathey perceived as a bike-unfriendly
tion Department, which always said
atmosphere—its lack of bike lanes or
that safety was its number-one priority.
cycling facilities, plus the occasional
But if that were true, we wouldn’t kill so
bottle or epithet hurled by a passing
many people, including 5,000 pedestrimotorist. Looking for ways to imans and 700 cyclists per year. In other
prove things, they attended a League
countries, they’ve been more active
of American Bicyclists rally in Euabout taking those words seriously.”
gene, Oregon, where they learned that
The United States has the highhundreds of millions of federal dollars
After three local cyclists were hit in eight
est traffic-death rate (15 per 100,000
were available for local bike projects;
days, Culver led the Sonoma County Bicycle
Coalition in demonstrations and mass gathresidents) of all developed democratic
but when they sat in on meetings of
erings at the drivers’ criminal trials.
countries. Several European nations—
the Santa Rosa Bicycle and Pedestrian
for example, Austria, Belgium, France,
Advisory Committee, they were told
Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland—have slashed their that, as a public agency, it wasn’t permitted to lobby for change.
annual traffic-fatality figures over the past few decades, largely
“The staff members recommended that we form an indepenthrough “traffic-calming” measures that forcibly reduce the dent advocacy group,” Mike says. The Santa Rosa Cycling Club,
speeds of motor vehicles. In places such as Germany and the of which he was a board member, feared that getting involved
Netherlands, traffic regulations are actually biased in favor of in politics would be divisive for a recreational organization. But
cyclists and pedestrians—in the event of a bike-car collision, the with $200 donated by the club, a few interested individuals belegal burden is on motorists to prove that they weren’t at fault, and gan holding regular meetings and producing a quarterly coaliDutch drivers are ­financially liable even if cyclists are at fault.
tion newsletter. With board members including a mayor, a transit
But that’s the Netherlands, where almost half of all local travel planner, an air-quality expert, a bike-shop owner, an accountant,
is done by bicycle. Dutch and German children are schooled in an attorney and an advocate for the poor, the group contained a
safe cycling practices and, when they grow older and learn to drive, formidable collection of skills, and within a year, it had impleare taught how to avoid vehicle collisions even with ­lawbreaking mented a bicycle-parking program and promoted a Bike to Work
Week. In time it would grow to include more than
750 members, representing cyclists at government
meetings, attracting hundreds of millions of dollars
“We need to put more responsibility
in set-asides for traffic planning, partnering with the
on what it means to drive an automobile. It’s criminal city of Santa Rosa to establish a Share the Road cam
not to be in control of your car.”
paign, implementing Street Skills for Cyclists and
bicycle-education classes for traffic-ticket holders.
cyclists. In the United States, by contrast, drivers aren’t trained to It has also created at least one new bike lane and bike path per
expect bikes on the road; as bicycle lawyer Brustin observes, after year, sold thousands of cycling maps of Sonoma County, obtained
a car runs into a bike, “the number-one statement [of motorists] 501(c)(3) nonprofit status and in general, according to Christine
is ‘I didn’t see him.”’
Culver, “explained that bikes belong on our roads—even the
“That’s just unacceptable,” declares Christine Culver, executive most narrow road—and that people need to be in control of their
director of the Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition. “Having stuff cars. It comes down to everyone needing to take a breath and rehanging from your rearview mirror isn’t worth somebody’s life. lax—and it’s made a huge difference here. Now we’re contacted
We can all relate to what it’s like to be in a car and do something by ­cities and the county when they have questions about implestupid, but as a result, people are reluctant to punish [distracted menting a bicycle project.”
drivers]. They think, ‘If someone’s dead, what good is it going to
A former collegiate and pro mountain bike racer (she won the
do?’ It used to be that way with drunk drivers, too. We need to national downhill championship in 1989), Culver got involved
put more responsibility on what it means to drive an automobile. with the Coalition in 2001. She’d been riding her bike to work at
It’s criminal not to be in control of your car, and there should be Aussie Racing Apparel one morning in Petaluma, south of Santa
consequences for it. We’ve done an amazing job protecting people Rosa, when a driver stopped and motioned for her to cross while
School, where she was nicknamed Forrest Gump because of her
surprising speed. Shorter than most of her opponents, Mason was
a fierce competitor in the 100-meter hurdles despite taking four
steps between each set of barriers instead of the usual three (and
thus leading with a different leg on every other hurdle). She had
gone on to run marathons at Santa Clara University, which she’d
attended at the same time as Ross Dillon—in fact, she’d contrib-
half-Ironman triathlon, riding 30 miles in Sonoma Valley that
April 11, passing not far from the Dillons’ house on Trinity Road.
At 11:19 a.m., the route brought them back into eastern Santa Rosa
on California Highway 12, a high-speed artery that becomes increasingly congested as it approaches the city. Local riders avoid
it, but Liu and Mason were out-of-town visitors, seeking the most
direct route back into town to meet Liu’s mother for brunch.
As the couple pedaled west on the highway,
Harvey Hereford got into his Nissan Sentra at
the seniors-only Oakmont subdivision, adjacent to Highway 12. Hereford wasn’t expecting
any Easter visitors; on the contrary, he later said
that he felt deserted by his family. A 69-yearApparently, no. But actually, yes—and for a surprising reason.
old personal-injury attorney, he was described
Do a quick web search “participated” in the sport
estimating numbers of
by neighbors as a friendly and funny guy, but
or ask any group of cyclists (that means someone
cyclists only since 1984,
his ex-wife had recently called police when
if riding on the road is more at least seven years old
so we can’t compute
she couldn’t reach him, thinking he might be
dangerous than ever, and
rode a bike at least six
earlier safety rates.)
suicidal. Over the past 15 years, 10 federal tax
What becomes clear
the prevailing opinion is
times a year), while the
liens and one state Employment Development
an unequivocal yes—that
number of “frequent”
is that, as numbers of
under the pressure of
participants—those who
cyclists increase, the rate
lien had been issued against Hereford’s office
a growing population,
rode at least 110 days out
of fatalities decreases.
and former residence in San Francisco.
more congestion, denser
of the year, averaging 97
This inverse relationship
At 11:20, a pair of Oakmont residents, Kate
development, bigger
miles per week—was 5.6
is borne out by a 2003
Brolan
and Sydney Brown, were sitting in their
and faster cars, and an
million. (Some sources cite report entitled “Safety
car on Pythian Road, waiting at a red light at
ever-increasing array of
higher and lower numbers
in Numbers” by Peter L.
is it getting worse?
distracting gadgets, the
risk of a car-bike crash is
at an all-time high.
But according to the
National Highway Traffic
Safety Administration’s
Center for Statistics and
Analysis, over the past
decade the number of U.S.
cycling fatalities has held
relatively steady, hovering
just above or below 700 per
year. Compared with 1995,
when 833 riders were
killed, or the all-time highest year, 1975, when the
number topped 1,000, the
trend seems to be toward
greater safety.
That’s wrong. Based on
its annual nationwide survey of 10,000 households,
the National Sporting
Goods Association (NSGA)
estimates that, in 2005,
43 million Americans
c o u r t e s y
she was waiting on the shoulder.
On Easter Sunday of 2004, Alan Liu and Jill Mason embarked
“There wasn’t any crosswalk,” Culver remembers. “The guy on a bike ride from Santa Rosa. They’d been dating for about six
stopped in the middle of the street. If I got hit in that situation, months since meeting on the master’s swim team in Mountain
I would have been at fault—so I waved him on, and suddenly he View, south of San Francisco. Liu, 31, was the team’s head coach;
started yelling at me to get off the road. Apparently it angered a graduate of MIT and Stanford, he was employed by Applied
him that he’d made this effort and I hadn’t taken his offer. A lot of Materials, a semiconductor-equipment manufacturer in Silicon
people don’t think it’s even legal for cyclists to be on the street.”
Valley, where he’d recently been made a manager. (He also held
As soon as she got to work that day, Culver
did a web search for “Sonoma County Bicycle
Coalition.” She didn’t even know if such a group
existed—she’d never been a member of any organization in her life—but she’d noticed the effectiveness of the San Francisco and Marin County
coalitions next door. “Marin had done a fantastic
job promoting Safe Routes to School,” she says.
“San Francisco got bike lanes put in throughout
the city and opened the Golden Gate Bridge
to bicycles twenty-four hours a day. It showed
that bikes are a transportation mechanism just
as valid as cars, and it gave me the idea that we
could make a change.”
Culver started going to SCBC meetings and
volunteering at the group’s public-information
tables. “I’d been working in sales and bike shops
for fifteen years,” she remembers. “Now I was
going to council meetings and trying to figure
out the system—who was making policy decisions, who were the bicycle-friendly politicians,
where the money for bike projects came from.”
She turned out to be a fast learner: Culver was
elected to the Coalition’s board of directors that
same year and became its executive director in
June 2002—the same month that Cathie Hamer
ran into Ross Dillon.
At the time, Culver says, she didn’t know how
to support a family in the Dillons’ circumstances.
“I didn’t want to intrude on their grief,” she says.
“Their focus was on Ross, and it seemed so trivial to say, ‘I want to go after this woman.’ I tried
to get more information, but the police wouldn’t
release the accident report to me because I wasn’t
family. I kept running into roadblocks and didn’t
know how to get around them.”
As part of her education in two-wheeled
politics, Culver also attended educational
­retreats staged by the Thunderhead Alliance,
Mason was run over by a drunk driver on Easter Sunday, 2004.
a national coalition of local and state bicycle
groups working to influence legislation and advance bicycle safety. She started to learn how to
deal with the media, raise money and connect with public offi- four engineering patents.) In addition, Liu was a successful coach:
cials. “A lot of it is networking and long-term relationships,” she A competitive swimmer since age five, he was known for encoursays. “Now I have contacts I can call in local law enforcement. aging people to perform beyond their own expectations. Since
I’ve also learned that families like the Dillons need the support taking over the 300-member Mountain View master’s program
of the cycling community—people with the background to in 1997, he’d expanded it to include water polo and triathlons.
pressure the D.A. and see that justice is done.”
Like Liu, Mason, 26, was a triathlete. Growing up in the
Unfortunately, after two years of on-the-job learning, Culver ­Sierra Nevada foothills, she’d been a member of the track,
would get a chance to put her new skills to the test.
cross-country, lacrosse and soccer teams at Nevada Union High
for both groups, but to
maintain consistency
when citing earlier studies,
we’ve gone with NSGA.)
Do the math, and in 2005,
one American cyclist died
for every 7,100 who could
be considered the sport’s
core—us.
In 1995, according to
NSGA, there were more
participants: 56 million
total, with 9 million frequent riders—and it turns
out that one out of every
10,800 core cyclists was
killed, a significantly safer
percentage than today.
The biggest year of serious participation—1991,
with 11.5 million frequent
cyclists—was the safest
single-year percentage on
record: 834 fatalities, or
one for every 13,641 core
cyclists. (NSGA has been
Jacobsen, a public-health
consultant in Sacramento,
California. Studying cities
of varying sizes from
California to Scandinavia
to the United Kingdom to
the Netherlands, Jacobsen
found that collisions between motor vehicles and
people walking or bicycling
declined with increases in
the numbers of pedestrians and cyclists, partly
because motorists in footor bike-prone communities are themselves more
likely to walk or bicycle
occasionally, and thus give
greater consideration to
others who are doing it.
Jacobsen’s fundamental
conclusion: “A motorist is
less likely to collide with
a person walking or bicycling if more people walk
or bicycle.”—D.D.
uted to his rehabilitation fund the previous year. With a new master’s degree in mass communications from San Jose State, Mason
was working as a marketing director for an environmental and
geotechnical engineering company in Mountain View, where she
met Alan Liu after joining the swim team. The confident, upbeat
Mason was a match for the energetic Liu, and soon the two of
them were running, riding and swimming together regularly.
They planned their Easter ride to prepare for an upcoming
Mason’s
boyfriend Liu
(right), who
was riding
behind her
and was struck
first, died
instantly.
the intersection with Highway 12. When the
light turned green, a Nissan Sentra in front of
them pulled out and turned toward Santa Rosa;
within seconds, according to Brown, it was flying “like a shot out of hell,” weaving all over
the road as it bore down on a pair of cyclists
on the shoulder. Liu was riding behind Mason,
and the car hit him first, killing him instantly
as it severed his brain stem. An instant later it
slammed into Mason, cleaving her spinal cord,
lacerating her liver, breaking her arm and traumatizing her brain. When Brolan and Brown
reached her, she was sobbing and shivering on
the ground.
Not unlike Cathie Hamer’s Mitsubishi, the
Nissan came to a stop a hundred yards up the road, where its driver was detained by a couple of passing off-duty cops. ­Hereford,
whose driver’s license was found to have expired, told the officers
that he suspected something was wrong when he noticed that his
windshield was broken. He didn’t remember running into anybody; nor did he remember getting into his car or driving away
from his house. His blood-alcohol percentage was 0.29, more
than three times the legal limit.
As with Ross Dillon, doctors at
Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital expected
­Mason to either die or remain in a vegetative state. A day after the crash, her
mother and father—Joanne, a school
counselor, and Larry, an adaptive phys
ed teacher for disabled students—were
given the same pessimistic advice the
Dillons had received. That night, more
than three dozen Sonoma County Bicycle Coalition members gathered in front
of the county courthouse and rode in
silence to the hospital, where they held
a candlelight vigil for Mason. Among
them were Betsy and Rusty Dillon, who
urged Mason’s parents not to give up—
they said they’d received similar predictions about Ross, and that two years later
he was still improving.
Sure enough, the next day Jill Mason’s doctors reported that her prognosis wasn’t as bad as they’d feared. But the
story was over for Alan Liu, whose stepsister had been killed by a drunk driver
on New Year’s Day the previous year.
one
really good,
really
simple idea
cite a study that compared the risks, on a
per-passenger-mile basis, of all modes of
transportation. “Scuba diving tops the
list,” he revealed. “Elevator travel is the
safest mode of transportation. Cycling is
slightly more dangerous than driving.”
In Kansas, drivers must pass
O’Reilly lived 20 miles southeast
a 20-question, multiplechoice, take-home exam as
of Santa Rosa in the town of Agua
part of the license-renewal
Caliente,­ where he and his wife, ­Patty,
process. Craig Weinaug, a
a dance teacher, were raising two
member of the Lawrence
daughters. A former fund-raiser for
Bicycle Club and a county
the San Francisco Ballet, he’d taken
administrator, says, “I could
answer most of the questions
up cycling when he couldn’t continue
without looking in the drivers’
dancing; he often made the 60-mile
manual, but there are always a
round-trip to work and back by bike,
few things you have to look
showering and changing in a locker
up,” he says. While flipping
room he’d convinced Kendall-Jackthrough the 64-page book, he
spotted a page devoted to bike
son to build. O’Reilly was known as
safety. “I figured, if a question
the company’s “environmental conabout bike safety was on the
science”—he’d spearheaded its biketest and if I could force
to-work and recycling programs, and
everybody in the state to read
on the evening of the day he e-mailed
that section of the manual at
least once, things might be a
Culver, he planned to check the insulalittle safer for cyclists.”
tion in his attic to see if it could be made
After two years of
more energy-efficient. At five o’clock
prodding, Weinaug convinced
on April 19, he started pedaling home
the appropriate Kansas
on Mark West Springs Road, aiming to
official to put a bike-safety
question on the test. The
circumvent the city on a winding backquestion reads:
country route called Riebli Road.
When passing a bicyclist on
A weeklong debate about traffic
William Michael Albertson was
any road or state highway,
safety and bicycle-car animosity enalso
headed east on Mark West Springs
drivers should give the cyclist
sued in the pages of the Santa Rosa
Road in a Ford F-150 pickup truck. The
at least:
A. Two feet of clearance
Press Democrat. A letter complaining
46-year-old, who lived in Lake County,
B. Three feet of clearance
about cyclists who run stop signs and
to the north, was on probation from
C. Four feet of clearance
hog the road was printed in the paper
federal prison for battery with serious
The correct answer is C,
under the headline “Educate Riders,”
bodily injury. Clinically diagnosed as
which allows cyclists one
and one week after the Mason-Liu
bipolar, he also had a history of alcomore foot of clearance than
most states. Weinaug’s next
tragedy, Press Democrat reporter Paul
holism, but had been sober from 1984
goal: bring his idea to other
Payne published a story about “dareto 1999. During that time, Albertson
states.
devil” cyclists entitled “Taking Risks
had developed a successful recording
For information, e-mail the LBC
on the Road.” None of this negative
business, but in 1996 a loudspeaker had
at: questions_lbc@yahoo.
rhetoric pertained to the behavior of
fallen on him, injuring his back. He’d
com.—C.M.
Mason and Liu, who had been ridsubsequently become addicted to paining single file on the shoulder, and
killers, and on April 19 he was out of
Christine Culver vented her outrage
drugs—he’d caused a ruckus in nearby
that day at an SCBC information table on the Sonoma town Healdsburg when he showed up at a couple of medical facilities
plaza. “They’re trying to make this a bicycling issue when it’s demanding medication, then driven on to Santa Rosa and started
a drunk-driving issue,” she complained to Danny O’Reilly, drinking in his truck. Eventually he’d called a girlfriend to come
an SCBC member who had volunteered to park bikes at the pick him up, but she’d responded that a DUI would serve him
Earth Day celebration they were both staffing.
right. Ultimately, Albertson later claimed, he decided to check
O’Reilly, a marketing analyst at Kendall-Jackson Wine himself into a hospital in St. Helena, 25 miles from Santa Rosa via
­Estates, north of Santa Rosa, e-mailed Culver from work the next Mark West Springs Road.
day. “I read the article you mentioned,” he wrote. “It’s just that
According to the police report, Albertson rear-ended a
a stupid motorist can do a whole lot more damage than a stupid ­vehicle at a red light at 4:38 p.m. He drove away, and 45 minutes
cyclist. That’s where the author let everyone down. All activities later the Highway Patrol got a call from a fireman reporting an ­
carry a risk to them—even sitting on your couch (radon gas under F-150 blocking a lane of Mark West Springs Road. The truck
the home or formaldehyde in the insulation).” O’Reilly went on to had a broken headlight and a dented hood, and the right side of
its windshield was shattered; the driver, described as intoxicated
and belligerent, was resisting efforts to treat a cut on his forehead. When the police arrived, Albertson got out of his truck and
blurted, “Fuck you, copper! I’m a convicted felon—what are you
going to do?” He reached into the rear of his waistband and took
a step toward the patrolman, who doused him with pepper spray
and arrested him. Albertson’s blood-alcohol level was 0.22.
As firefighters were clearing debris, they noticed a bicycle
wheel on the south side of the road. Looking farther, they peered
over an adjacent guardrail and saw a body 10 yards away. It was
determined that Danny O’Reilly had died of a head injury, and
moreover that his hair matched a sample found in Albertson’s
windshield. Albertson, who hadn’t previously said anything about
hitting a cyclist, admitted he’d sideswiped O’Reilly; he said he’d
“stopped and prayed,” but had continued driving, losing control
of his truck at the spot where he was arrested.
“You know what I am?” Albertson sobbed to police officers
who’d taken him to a hospital for a blood test. “I’m a fucking
junkie. I’m an artist but...I killed that man and I need to pay.”
they don’t have any reason to get involved,” Culver says. “We
had to show that a bicyclist isn’t just something in your way—it’s
somebody’s dad, or dentist or doctor.” This new alliance with the
county’s Victim Assistance Center (a division of the district attorney’s office) gave the SCBC an ear on the court schedule, so when
hearings for Hereford and Albertson were imminent, ­ Culver ­
e-mailed the SCBC membership, urging people to take off work
and show up at the courthouse in person.
Given the narrow time span in which Liu and O’Reilly were
killed, legal proceedings against the two drivers were almost simultaneous. Bill Brockley, a deputy D.A. in the homicide division,
was handling both cases for the county; and when he came down
the corridor for Hereford’s arraignment, he was surprised to see a
crowd outside the courtroom. “There were probably 50 people,”
Brockley remembers. “I thought it was going to be support for the
defendant, but as I got closer, I saw it was people carrying helmets
and wearing bicycle lapel pins.” This demonstration continued
throughout the summer, with cyclists filling the courtrooms even
when hearings for Hereford and Albertson occurred at the same
time. Reportedly, everyone who worked in the courthouse, from
bailiffs to lawyers to judges, was moved by the show of support.
“You rarely get people coming to court when they don’t
know the victim,” says Brockley, the prosecuting attorney. “It
was ­remarkable that most of them weren’t personally acquainted
When Christine Culver learned that Danny O’Reilly had
been run over on the same day he’d e-mailed her about the risks with the cyclists who died—they were just concerned citizens
of road cycling, she was, to put it mildly, stunned. “He was such who helped the court see the seriousness and reality of the losses.
a good person,” she laments. “Danny was the kind of soul you When a judge has discretion in sentencing and knows that the
wish this world could have more of.” In light of the Mason-Liu public is watching, it really has an effect.”
tragedy only a week earlier, it seemed that some kind of curse
Hereford and Albertson both ended up pleading guilty to
had been cast on Sonoma County cyclists. The SCBC didn’t react ­vehicular manslaughter and driving under the influence. At Herwith voodoo rituals, however. A lawyer named Oren Noah, one eford’s sentencing, he was confronted by an especially effective
of the group’s founding members, proposed a campaign similar witness: the wheelchair-bound Jill Mason, who had been released
to one that had been waged five years earlier in Marin County, from the hospital only a few days earlier. After Hereford ran into
after a rider named Cecily Krone—an occupational therapist her, Mason had remained in a coma for five days; a hole had been
who worked with handicapped children—was killed at 9:30 a.m. cut into her throat to allow her to breathe, and surgeons operated
on a Sunday by a drunk driver searching for a cigarette. Cyclists on her broken spine for 12 hours. She was fed through a tube for
packed county courtrooms at every hearing related to the case, a month, and didn’t speak for eight weeks. She had no memory of
and the driver was sentenced to six years in jail for vehicular the crash, nor of Alan Liu—she found out that she’d lost a boyfriend from e-mail collected on her computer.
Today Mason can drive a car, paddle a kayak,
work out at a gym and ride a hand-powered bike. She
“We had to show that a bicyclist isn’t just
lives on her own with a roommate in Sacramento
something in your way,” says Culver. “It’s somebody’s
and gives PowerPoint presentations to school groups
dad, or dentist or doctor.”
for the Every Fifteen Minutes program (named for
the frequency with which someone dies in a drunk­manslaughter. Noah now suggested that Sonoma cyclists follow driving crash). Short of some miraculous breakthrough in medithat example, not only to draw the attention of judges and the me- cal research, however, she’ll never walk again.
dia, but also to show the perpetrators themselves “that they killed
Hereford, who admitted he was guilty of “a monumentally
humans with friends and robbed from the community.... [and to] selfish act,” was sentenced to eight years and eight months in prismaintain the focus where it should be: on the drunk killers.”
on, the maximum for his offenses. Albertson, whose punishment
Two nights after O’Reilly’s death, SCBC members joined a was aggravated by fleeing the scene as well as by his earlier felony
group of victims-rights advocates in front of the Sonoma County conviction for battery, got 14 years.
courthouse. Before newspaper and TV reporters, they ham“The court does intend to send a message to the defendant(s)
mered home the message that these deaths weren’t an inevitable and to the community that drinking and driving will not be toler­outgrowth of a dangerous sport, but rather products of a cul- ated in Sonoma County,” declared judge Elaine Rushing. “Bicycle
tural attitude that promotes impatience and irresponsibility. “If riders have the same rights as automobile drivers.”
the public thinks it’s just ‘those crazy people’ who were killed,
Unfortunately, Rushing neglected to heed her own message.
Nine months later, she was arrested for drunk driving on Riebli
Road, not far from the spot where Albertson killed O’Reilly. She
remains on the bench, but no longer hears criminal cases.
After O’Reilly
corresponded
with and then
confronted the
man who’d killed
her husband,
Danny, she says
she was able to
let go of her
“poisonous anger.”
Albertson
­(opposite), in
state prison,
looked through
the family photo
album O’Reilly
brought to their
meeting.
d u r e l l / l o s
r o b e r t
p h o t o
c r e d i t
a n g e l e s
t i m e s
For months after Danny O’Reilly died, his widow, Patty,
was unable to sleep, cook or clean. She abandoned the garden that
Danny had planted and she closed her 11-year-old ballet school in
Vallejo, 25 miles away. What she wanted most at that point, other
than getting her husband back, was revenge on his killer.
One night during this period, as O’Reilly’s daughters—­
12-year-old Erin and seven-year-old Siobhan—were resisting her
order to take a bath, she found herself screaming at them in a way
that hardly fit their crime. “They were the last people who needed
to be yelled at,” she acknowledges now. “I was carrying around a
lot of anger and hatred and self-pity, and in that moment it became clear to me that I had to let go of it. Otherwise, I would end
up hurting not Mike Albertson, but my daughters and myself.”
At Albertson’s sentencing, Patty would have a chance to
­address him directly. Before that took place, however, she read
a background report on him that revealed that, as a child, he
had been raped by his own father. “If I called him the scum of
the earth,” O’Reilly reasoned, “he would just feel more self-pity.
Then, when he got out of jail, he’d probably start drinking again
and another family would be in our situation.”
Albertson wept throughout his sentencing hearing, ultimately
apologizing to the family and asking for their forgiveness. Sometime after that, Siobhan made a card for him that contained a
drawing of her own face streaked with tears; it nevertheless said,
“I’m not mad at you.” Patty subsequently decided to investigate a
new state prison program for “restorative justice,” in which victims meet with convicts so that both can process the consequences of their crimes. Her first such excursion was to San Quentin,
in Marin County, where she spoke not with Albertson but with
other convicted killers. The following year, a mediator from the
California Office of Victim and Survivor Services, Rochelle
­Edwards, arranged a meeting between O’Reilly and Albertson.
In order to take part in the encounter, Albertson had to undergo months of preparation and training, which included accepting
responsibility for his crime. Over the course of these meetings, he
told Edwards that, in the weeks before he killed Danny O’Reilly,
he had been angry at an acquaintance of his girlfriend’s, who had
been urging her to end her codependent relationship. The friend
happened to be a cyclist, and Albertson had developed a theory
that, when he saw O’Reilly on his bike, he might have transferred
his rage to Danny and hit him intentionally.
Edwards conveyed this to Patty, who, as she thought it over,
doubted that the drunken Albertson would have been able
to steer his truck that well. She decided she still wanted to go
through with the meeting, which took place in September 2006 at
a state prison near Sacramento. Accompanied by her sister Mary,
O’Reilly sat across a table from Albertson and told him how much
hatred she’d felt toward him; she recounted her last conversation
with Danny, and she recalled the nightmare, when he didn’t come
home that night, of seeing a sheriff’s deputy approach their house.
“Maybe this is
a chance to
redeem
yourself,”
O’Reilly told
her husband’s
killer.
She described the reactions of her daughters when she told them
that their father was dead, showed Albertson an album of family
photos, and enumerated all the things she and her children had to
do without a father or husband. Still, she said, it had taken courage for Albertson to admit he might have hit Danny on purpose.
“Maybe this is a chance to redeem yourself,” she said.
Albertson said he’d been driven to addiction by a history of
abuse. He revealed that after hitting Danny, crashing his truck,
and seeing the Highway Patrol pull up, he’d pretended to reach
for a gun because he wanted to be put out of his misery. He admitted, however, that nobody could repair the damage from what he
had lived through. “I just have to feel it,” he said.
O’Reilly told Albertson not to feel sorry for himself—that
would constitute “going backward.” She urged him to stay active
in Alcoholics Anonymous and she gave him a bracelet that Siobhan, now 10, had made for him. As part of the restorative justice
program, Albertson is required to write to O’Reilly every three
months, and in their correspondence, Patty later suggested to
him that, in addition to staying sober, Albertson get help for the
emotional trauma that had caused him to start drinking.
A prison guard told Edwards that, until Albertson started corresponding with O’Reilly, he’d never heard an inmate admit blame
for a crime. “‘Satisfying’ isn’t really the right word to describe it,”
O’Reilly says of her resulting feelings. “Mike also thanked me for
saving his life, which came as a bit of a shock—I can’t say I was
entirely pleased to be thanked for saving the man who killed my
husband. But I’m glad this process forced him to deal with issues
he had chosen not to deal with.”
In the course of confronting Albertson, Patty had researched
the word “vengeance,” which, she learned, had less to do with revenge than it did with justice. “My revenge was for him to face me
across a table and get the full impact of what he did,” she says. “I
don’t think ‘an eye for an eye’ was ever meant to be taken literally,
but in that sense I got a life for a life. Mike is a different man now.
And I’ve let go of the poisonous anger I felt, which has helped me
and my daughters heal.”
A few months after O’Reilly resolved to forgive Albertson,
­another ballet school came up for sale in Sonoma. Its director was
retiring, and Patty decided to buy it with life insurance from Danny. She now works 3 miles from home, teaching children the art
and discipline that first brought her and her husband together.
the fallen
Just 14 of the 7,000-plus cyclists who have been
killed in the past decade
(1) Kevin
Pecor, 16
(5) Brad
(8) Susanne
Neil Scaringi, 27
Struck September 2006
Gorman, 41
On her morning commute in Seattle,
an SUV struck Scaringi, killing her
A Tucson, Arizona, realtor, Gorman
instantly. An earthquake on Mt.
worked long hours, “but he never lost
Rainier, which she climbed twice,
his temper. He used cycling as an outlet occurred at 7:48 p.m. on the same day
for his frustrations,” says his mother,
as her memorial
Jean Gorman. He was struck while
service. Her father,
training for his seventh Tour de TucMike Neil, realized
son. Jean fought for new state laws
that there were
in his honor. Her efforts produced a 3seven letters in his
foot passing law and “the road where
daughter’s first name,
Brad was killed now has 6-foot bike
four in her middle
1
lanes,” Jean says.
name and eight in
her last name. “God
Struck January 2003
Struck September 1999
“He could have had his driver’s
license, but he loved his bike and rode
it everywhere,” says Pecor’s mother,
Sheila. An animal lover, the Massachusetts native rooted for the Miami
Dolphins because he liked
the sea creatures. On his way home
from his after-school job, Pecor
was hit by uninsured driver with a
suspended license.
(2) Charles
three lines of traffic. If you rode a
quarter-mile more, you could exit
on the right,” says his wife, Bonnie.
Bliss died instantly after being hit by a
pickup truck.
Barr, 31
Struck August 2006
At 10 a.m. on February 20, 2007, Stage 2 of the Tour of Cali-
Olympic Trials and earned two top-20
finishes in the U.S. National Time Trial
Championships, but cycling had taken
a lower priority: “We had just moved
into a new house, and just had a baby,
who was eight months old,” says his
wife, Deb.
(11) Scott
Dominion, 42
Struck May 2007
A happily vagrant environmentalist,
Dominion (left) traveled with his van
and his bike. He was a member of the
Second City comedy troupe, once
working with Robin Williams and
Angela Lansbury. “He got his gigs and
lived like a pauper in between that,”
says his mother, Marilyn Coffey. He
was hit from behind in Florida.
(12) Jan
Briese, 68
Struck May 2005
Briese was an active community
member, and “on the day she died,
Barr, a double bassist, studied at
the Curtis Institute, in Philadelphia,
then earned a spot in the Cleveland
Orchestra. “He was finally able to buy
all the great things there are to buy
in the bike world,” says Barr’s father,
3
2
4
5
7
9
8
Eric. One morning, Barr played bass
for the last time before a pickup
truck struck and killed him during a
ride that afternoon.
Wonders, 25
Struck March 2004
While serving in the U.S. Navy as an
instructor at the Naval Nuclear Power
School, Wonders shot to Cat I in four
years. He was training for the Olympic
Trials when an SUV struck and killed
him. His death inspired the Charleston,
South Carolina, region to focus more
on cycling, says his wife, Terri: “The
Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge was built
with a bike-pedestrian lane. Even if it’s
raining‚ there are tons of people on it.”
The lane was named Wonders’ Way.
(6) Jane
Higdon, 47
created an earthquake in
her name,” Neil says.
struck may 2006
“Queen Jane” created a
micronutrient center at
Oregon State University,
in Eugene, and completed seven Ironman
triathlons. She died on a
four-person ride when
a log truck attempted
to pass her single-file
group on a tight turn.
(7)
Bill Bliss, 70
Struck June 2005
(9) Sue
Gygax, 59
Struck august 2005
13
14
Bliss advanced cycling
rights in California by successfully lobbying to amend a law stating
cyclists must take the first exit on a
freeway. “A freeway in Santa Cruz
had a left exit and you had to cross
Gygax traveled the world
with husband Wayne
Martin, who says, “We
took a monthlong selfsupported trip through
Mexico, and we cycled the Alps
in Europe.” Martin is haunted that
his wife’s death occurred while
cycling just miles from their home,
in Chelan, Washington.
(10) Jonathan
Dechau, 33
Struck September 2006
Dechau, a Cat 1 racer, was struck
on a training ride in Lima, New
York. Dechau competed in the 2000
(14) Timothy O’Donnell,
Struck June 2007
66
After 21 years in the Air Force,
O’Donnell began working at an
aircraft-maintenance business in
Oregon, and was “the go-to guy
if a person had problems with an
aircraft,” says Mary, his wife. “Everything in Tim’s life was a challenge to
him, including cycling.” A driver attempting an illegal pass hit O’Donnell
as he rode with Portland Velo. He died
at the scene.—C.M.
j o n e s
(4) Garrett
12
11
10
P.
Lagattolla joined a women’s crosscountry cycling tour, but made
it only halfway. An SUV struck her
near her hotel in Texas. Lagattolla,
a ­family-practice physician from
Connecticut, hoped to volunteer with
Doctors Without Borders after the trip.
Walmsley, the victim of a hit-andrun accident in Phoenix, Arizona,
joined the Sierra Club in the 1960s
and, through it, started cycling. He
introduced his two sons to outdoor
sports by enrolling them in Boy
Scouts, where he was a leader, and
later, they traveled the Southwest
in a Volkswagen Bus to ride double
centuries on the weekends.
m i c h a e l
Lagattolla, 58
Struck April 2006
Walmsley, 65
Struck April 2007
( x14 )
(3) Laraine
(13) Bob
c o u r t e s y
6
she had volunteered to weed a public garden in town. She was going
to sewing club that night,” says her
daughter, Sara Jo. While leading
a ride with the Joliet Bicycle Club
in Illinois, Briese was run over
by an elderly man with macular
degeneration.
fornia rolled out of Santa Rosa into Sonoma Valley. Within half an
hour of the start, the race crossed Highway 12 and began climbing Trinity Road, the day’s first test in the King of the Mountains
competition. Partway up the 3-mile, 1,320-foot climb, the riders
passed a driveway where a group of friends and families had gathered, waving and clanging cowbells as the peloton passed by. In
the throng, wearing a red-and-white bicycle jersey and sitting in
a wheelchair, was Ross Dillon.
In the five years since he was run into by Cathie Hamer,
­Dillon—thanks to his family, a nationwide support network
and hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations—had defied
his doctors’ predictions. Unresponsive and incapable of movement when he came home in June 2003 (he was still being fed
through a tube), Dillon started moving his right leg the following
December and swallowing pureed food in March; by July ’04 he
was nodding or shaking his head in response to questions, and six
months later he started feeding himself with a spoon. In July ’05,
after seeming to mouth words silently for some time, he flabbergasted his family and live-in caregiver, Jeremiah Temo, by saying,
“I love my parents and they love me” and “I don’t want to die.”
“My theory is that he’d been practicing,” his mother Betsy
says. “I’ve always thought there was more going on cognitively
than Ross could show us.”
A week before the Tour of California came by, Dillon had stood
up under his own power, steadied by Temo’s hand on his arm. “His
therapists all say they don’t see a ceiling yet,” Betsy reports.
Dillon’s upper body is amazingly strong—the kind of musculature you would expect from a mature athlete in his prime. Still,
it’s hard to watch his 60-year-old parents struggle to reteach their
30-year-old son how to walk and talk. Although Dillon’s spinal
cord was undamaged, his brain injuries were severe, and from the
waist up, his motor and cognitive skills lag far behind those of
Jill Mason. Enormous effort is required for him to ambulate and
communicate, and even though his stubbornness seems intact,
his attention continually wanders (to be recaptured, most typically, by gummy bears, which he reliably grabs and chews).
“We had Ross as we knew him up to that instant [when Hamer
hit him], and then we had another Ross,” his father Rusty says
philosophically. “He’s still distinctly Ross, but one whose life is
extremely different. At one point it was hard to believe he would
be able to do one-tenth of what he does now. So we have to live
according to our faith, trusting that his story isn’t over yet.”
Betsy offers an apt metaphor for how they cope. “We just put
one foot in front of the other,” she says. “My hope is that Ross will
be independent—able to take care of himself, with supervision—
by the time I’m gone. Usually I can be totally focused on doing
what’s best for him. Periodically I’m overwhelmed with grief; it
takes me about an hour or so, and then I’m back in the saddle. It
has to do with the juxtaposition of where he is now and where he
was before—he was so vigorous and excited about getting married and going to law school. He had moved from being our child
to being our friend. And he wanted to be a dad so bad.”
Cathie Hamer became a mother earlier this year. She was
never charged with any driving infraction, fined, ordered to
perform community service, or even required to attend traffic
West
Burnside and
14th St.,
Portland,
Oregon.
chilling memorials
The first “ghost bike” to mark a car-bike crash was
installed in St. Louis in 2002 by Patrick Van Der Tuin, who
helps run a shop that caters to low-income cyclists, and
witnessed an SUV hit a cyclist in a bike lane. “I didn’t say
anything to anyone when I did it, but it got people talking,”
he says. Van Der Tuin’s idea has spread to cities nationwide,
and even internationally, but remains semi-underground,
organized by a loose collaboration of cycling advocates and
concerned riders in their respective cities. The bikes
typically have plaques affixed to them which contain
different messages depending on who puts them up; in St.
Louis and Seattle, for instance, ghost bikes mark the location
of any car-bike accident, not merely fatal ones. Michael
Jones, who helped put up the first ghost bikes in Portland,
Oregon, says that a website linking ghost bike projects is in
the works but sustaining interest from volunteers is difficult.
Another problem: Laws against littering and erecting
roadside memorials mean that most bikes last for only a few
weeks. But there are exceptions. In New York City, where
ghost bikes are largely the work of volunteers from the
environmental organization TIME’S UP! (times-up.org), and
art-activism group Visual Resistance (visualresistance.org),
a ghost bike for Andre Anderson, a 14-year-old hit from
behind two years ago by an SUV, still stands in Far Rockaway,
Queens. One of the very first, for 21-year-old Brandie Bailey,
who was killed in 2005 on her way home from work, is still
maintained at Houston Street and Avenue A in Manhattan.
“We’re not yelling for bike lanes,” says Rachael Myers, a
member of TIME’S UP!. “What we’re looking for is a little
more intangible. We’re hoping that the culture changes.”
Two other types of memorials are gaining popularity:
On a Sunday night last summer, in Madison, Wisconsin,
and surrounding Dane County, volunteers erected 500 black
signs, reading “crashes are no accident,” on roadsides. The
project sparked a city- and countywide discussion of bicycle
awareness. Funding was provided by donations in memory of
a local bicycle advocate killed by a car.
The Ride of Silence, which takes place annually in cities
across the globe, is a slow (max 12 mph), quiet memorial to
cyclists killed and injured on the road. In 2007, riders in 272
cities and even Antarctica set off at 7 p.m. local time to pay
their respects to the fallen and demand respect from motorists
on the roads. In Portland, and other cities with ghost bikes,
the ride often follows a route that passes or ends at a ghost
bike. INFO: ghostbikes.net; rideofsilence.org—Eric Fengler
bicycling n january/february 2008
c r e d i t
p h o t o
school for running into Dillon. She and her husband subsequently moved to the Mendocino County coast, though Hamer
still has a clothing shop in Sebastopol; at one point, the Dillons
received a telephone message from her mother offering to donate
an unspecified “portion of profits” from a sale at the store, but
Rusty and Betsy declined, saying they didn’t want a commercial
venture to use Ross’s name as advertising.
Today Betsy Dillon believes that anyone responsible for hitting another person should lose his or her license for six months
and be required to work in an injury clinic or rehab facility. “I
don’t think [Hamer] should have gone to jail,” Betsy allows, “but
I think she should be doing something more than feeling bad.”
“At the very least, she should be doing community service,”
says Christine Culver. “I have no doubt
she was distraught, but people have to
be responsible for their behavior. Her
­actions need to keep this from happening
to somebody else.”
It would be nice to be able to end this
story by describing how much safer the
Santa Rosa area is now for cyclists—how
the deaths of Liu and O’Reilly, and the
shattered lives of Dillon and Mason,
shocked Sonoma County into realizing
that, as Culver says, bicycles belong on the
road and people need to be in control of
their cars. In fact, last year the Santa Rosa
Police Department doubled the number of
speeding tickets it issued in 2005, helping
reduce vehicle collisions by 10 percent and
total traffic fatalities from 12 to two. But it’s
also true that, a year after Liu and O’Reilly
were killed, another drunk driver (72-yearold Joseph Lynchard) slaughtered another
innocent cyclist (43-year-old Kathryn
Black) on Mark West Springs Road and,
the year after that, an off-duty nurse on a
bike (47-year-old Kathy Hiebel) was slain
by a truck driver (46-year-old Reymundo
Hernandez) who turned in front of her at
an intersection in Santa Rosa. Lynchard,
who had six previous DUI arrests, will
probably die in jail—he pleaded guilty to
murder in a so-called Watson decision,
named for the Supreme Court finding
that ignoring the risks inherent in drunk
driving implies malicious intent. As for
Hernandez, a police investigation found
that he appeared to be at fault for killing
Hiebel, though no charges have yet been
filed against him.
“Is it safer?” Culver asks, pondering
the inevitable question. “I don’t know. It’s
better known now that hitting a cyclist is
a serious offense, but we still have a long
way to go. It’s a cultural shift that needs
to take place—a change in how we are in our cars. A change in
TV commercials that are always pushing speed and horsepower,
a change in the mind-set that racing around in a car is cool, and
a change in society’s understanding so we acknowledge the fact
that being inattentive at the wheel of a car is criminal.”
Maybe most basically, Culver believes, we need to change the
language we use to describe the consequences. “Call them crashes,” she says. “Not accidents.”
Berkeley, California-based David Darlington’s last story for bicycling was about Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, in September
2007. In addition to original research, this article is based on police and
legal documents, and on reporting that appeared in the San Francisco
Chronicle, Santa Rosa Press Democrat and Los Angeles Times.