Procrastinet

Mortality

filed under: Hey, What's The Big Idea

I've been riding my bike a lot in the last four or five weeks - out for rides in the morning with Max, to and from work, to and from the theater, dropping Max at daycare in the morning. I've really enjoyed it - not only the feeling of finally, finally getting some exercise, but the efficiency of getting around the city (faster than subway over almost any distance) and the sheer joy of moving quickly under your own power.

This morning, I was riding down 5th Ave. in Brooklyn, when I heard an ambulance coming up behind me. After several blocks it overtook me and sped ahead. A couple blocks later, I saw that 5th Ave. was blocked with police cars, and that a fire truck and a couple other ambulances were parked at angles across the road.

They were taping off the road and sidewalk, so I had to detour down a side street to 4th Ave. As I turned, I saw that at the center of all the police attention there was a P.C. Richards delivery truck, and a bike lying in the middle of an intersection.

When I got to 4th Ave. I went down one block and doubled back up to 5th. God knows why. Maybe because, in my resurgence of biking, I've spent some time contemplating the dangerous "what ifs" and trying to figure out, if things went hairy, just how bad it would be. I guess I wanted to see what a fellow biker who ended up on the wrong side of luck and traffic was going through, how it was being dealt with, what one could expect in that kind of situation.

I got back to 5th Ave. at the intersection where the accident had happened. I got off my bike and walked it up the sidewalk, through the crowds of gawkers. Before I even looked back at the scene, the faces of the people on the sidewalk told me what I was going to see.

Next to the bike, next to the truck, there was a blue tarp in the road. None of the medical personnel standing around were doing anything. Nobody was moving quickly.

I looked back at the bystanders, and heard a middle aged woman mutter to someone next to her: "muerte."

I looked back at the scene. Sticking out from the far side of the tarp was a leg with a running shoe.

Something went wrong for somebody on a bike. And it didn't make for a bad day, or a bad month, or a bad year of hospital and recovery and physical therapy. It was all over and done. She was just dead, right there on the street.

There's a lot more I thought I wanted to say but won't.

Hug your loved ones, folks, and be careful. And spare some thoughts and prayers for her friends and family.

**UPDATE**: I bought a Daily News today to see if there was anything about this - it turns out the victim was a 28 year old attorney named Elizabeth Padilla. She was alongside the PC Richards truck when its door opened. As she swerved around the door, she hit the side of a moving ice cream delivery truck on her left, and fell under the wheels. She was killed instantly.

It's the kind of thing that could happen to anybody. Exactly the wrong place, exactly the wrong time, falling exactly the wrong way.

I usually don't revise entries, but I've corrected the pronoun gender in the story above, because it felt disrespectful to leave it wrong.

Here's the story. Incidentally, I have a huge axe to grind with the Daily News over their handling of this. Here's their lead paragraph:

A bicyclist who tried to squeeze between two trucks on a bustling Brooklyn street was crushed to death yesterday after she fell underneath one of the rigs, police said.

Makes it sound like she was pushing her luck, trying to get away with something, right? Wrong. She happened to pass a parked truck as a moving truck passed her. She probably didn't even know the moving truck was there. It happens all the time. To say she "tried to squeeze between two trucks" is offensive in its implications.

They also add a gruesome detail, "Padilla's shoes were torn from her feet during the 9 a.m. collision and remained clipped into the pedals of her high end aluminum bike hours after the wreck." I'm sure that has caused many a shiver of horror among the News' readers.

Problem is, it's not true. Her shoe was still on her foot, and in the News' own picture, it's clear that her pedal clips are empty - you can't see it in the small online picture, but in the print edition it's clearly visible. Meaninglessly shoddy reporting like that seems disrespectful of the victim and her family.

Posted by rjt at June 9, 2005 12:21 PM