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Tragedies hit home
Auraraia has a history of pedestrian fatalities
By Ruthanne Johnson
rjohn180@mscd.edu

In a recent rash of automobile-pedestrian accidents in the Denver metro area, seven people have been killed in four separate incidents this November.

The most publicized incident occurred when Frank Bingham, his wife Becca and their two children – Macie, 4, and Garrison, 2 – were struck by a red pickup truck around 8:40 p.m. on Nov. 10 as they were crossing Arapahoe Street at 15th Street. The driver fled the scene, leaving behind a trail of debris, including a mangled two-seat stroller, the children’s shoes and the license plate from the truck.

The Auraria Campus is no stranger to such accidents, having had at least three pedestrians killed by automobiles since 1994.

Former Metro student Leif Igo was struck and killed in 1994 when another Metro student hit a patch of ice, swerved off the road, and hit Igo as he walked to class. Another man was struck by a gray pickup truck as he crossed Colfax near the south side of campus in 1999. Former UCD student Breona Taylor was killed after being struck by an RTD bus as she crossed Speer Boulevard while heading toward campus in January 2006.

Metro English major Ryan Armstrong, 21, survived being hit by a car in June 2001 near the intersection of Iliff and Peoria. He said that although he does not remember being struck by the car, he does remember the many surgeries and the rehabilitation in the years that followed.

“My friends tell me we were walking across the street to talk to some girls that we knew,” he said. “We stopped on the median and were joking around. Then I stepped off the median without looking, and boom.”

Armstrong was rushed to the hospital and doctors induced a coma to relieve pressure from swelling caused by his head injury. Now in his junior year, Armstrong said he only remembers bits and pieces from that year and he had to learn almost everything from scratch. “I had a tutor who had to teach me things like one plus one, the multiplication tables, basic words and sentence structure all over again,” he said.

Armstrong admits he was jaywalking and feels a kinship to Colorado’s latest victims of automobile-pedestrian accidents. “I breathe a sigh of grief for them, especially for those involved in hit-and-runs. And I feel lucky to be alive,” he said.

In the incident that left Bingham and her two children dead, the police tracked down the alleged driver, 36-year-old Lawrence Trujillo, and his passenger, 35-year-old Eric Snell. Trujillo, who admitted he had been drinking, has since been charged with three counts of vehicular homicide-DUI, vehicular homicide-reckless driving, leaving the scene of an accident resulting in death and one count of leaving the scene of an accident causing bodily injury and third-degree assault – 11 charges in all.

Trujillo’s lawyer, Robert Bernhardt, said Trujillo faces up to 24 years in a state correctional facility for each of the class-three felonies of vehicular homicide.

The National Center for Statistics and Analysis states that on average a pedestrian was killed in a traffic crash every 108 minutes in the United States in 2005. Of those 4,881 fatalities, 67 percent occurred on a weekend, with 34 percent occurring after dark. Eleven percent of drivers involved in automobile-pedestrian accidents showed signs they had been drinking alcohol, and 32 percent of the pedestrians had significant blood-alcohol levels.