The story of 40-year-old St. Louis resident Elizabeth Bansen,
who was was struck and killed by an SUV on Nov. 2 as she drove her wheelchair in the street from a corner store near her home, is far from an isolated incident.
On Sunday a Carmel Valley CA woman was hit and dragged by a vehicle as she traveled along the street. At the time of this writing, news reports had not identified the woman. Two weeks ago, Thomos Lacy of Kountze, Texas died after being thrown several feet from his motorized scooter.
In St. Louis, Bansen was unable to travel on the sidewalk near her home, so she took to the street.
"Much of the sidewalk along Bansen's three-block route is either broken or choked with weeds," wrote Jeremy Kohler of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. "Curb ramps are absent in key places, blocking access to the few passable stretches." (Read Path of resistance from the Nov. 10, 2005 St. Louis Post-Dispatch).
But that story didn't come for a full week after Bansen's death. Early reports said police did not know why she had been driving in the street on St. Louis's "busy Delmar Boulevard."
Wheelchair user Kerri Morgan was frustrated by early reports of Bansen's death. "It was driving me crazy. In the reports in the radio, TV and newspaper about this woman in the middle of the street, why would she be in the middle of the street?" Morgan told KDSK-TV Newsthat she figured it was the bad sidewalk. But that issue didn't surface until later.
"If this was something that the public cared about, Lisi Bansen wouldn't have had to wheel in the street," Colleen Starkloff, of the St. Louis-based Starkloff Disability Institute told reporters. "Our policymakers need to be aware of this and they need to get on it right away so we don't have people dying as they try to go about their day-to-day business."
No national statistics are compiled on the numbers of wheelchair riders' deaths caused by inaccessible sidewalks.
In February, Patricia Hofer was struck by a black pickup truck on West State St. in Rockford IL while wheeling down a dark street. "There are no actual sidewalks in the area, and it was raining," police told reporters..
Last summer, 76-year-old Addison Whipple of Fullerton CA was killed when he was struck by a minivan while traveling along Almond St. in his motorized wheelchair. A year earlier, Hubert McDonald, on his way to the Veteran's Administration in Fayetteville NC, driving down the street in his wheelchair, was hit and killed
In March, 2001, Fresno, CA wheelchair user Elias Gutierrez was killed when he was struck by a car as he was traveling in his power wheelchair next to the curb on Palm Avenue near Cornell. There were no curb cuts available to allow him to get onto the sidewalk. For more than a year, the 60-year-old activist had been complaining about the lack of sidewalks with curb ramps in the areas where he had to travel, saying he was being forced into the streets to travel to shopping and to visit friends. "It's our worst nightmare," Fresno disability activist Ed Eames said. Gutierrez had "become the victim of this city's wanton lack of concern with the issue of making sidewalks a safe haven for people in wheelchairs," said Eames.
The evening of Gutierrez's death, Fresno television stations broadcast the image of an overturned wheelchair on the sidewalk of Palm, and a single shoe in the street.