Lawyers and parents question Gilroy’s pedestrian safety after
three fatalities in four months
By Emily Alpert and Serdar Tumgoren Staff Writers
Gilroy – Terri Schoepe hoisted a handmade red flag over her shoulder. Two girls, toting pastel backpacks, scurried behind her as she crossed Welburn Avenue Wednesday afternoon. Flowers and teddy bears clustered on the corner behind them: a tribute to 5-year-old Julio Gonzalez, who died Tuesday after a truck hit him on his walk to school.
Schoepe isn’t a paid crossing guard. She’s a parent and a Welburn Avenue resident who says she’s doing what needs to be done.
“If the school or the city won’t be responsible for this,” Schoepe said, “the parents have to be.”
“It’s a bloody shame,” she added.
Gonzalez was the third pedestrian killed in Gilroy in less than four months, and the second in days, after environmentalist Norman Watenpaugh, 76, was hit and killed Sunday night on Wren Avenue, a site now marked by yellow flowers and a glittering collage.
Gonzalez’ death echoes that of Brayan Trejo, a 5-year-old boy killed at 10th and Church streets in June. There, weather-worn teddy bears and a flag bearing Brayan’s name continue to remind drivers of his untimely death.
The driver who hit Trejo, Robertina Franco, is facing vehicular manslaughter charges. The district attorney has yet to decide if the drivers who killed Watenpaugh and Gonzalez will be charged.
But as parents and residents cope with Tuesday’s tragedy, lawyers for the Trejo family are considering another culprit: the city.
“It strikes as strange indeed that we have three fatalities in a matter of a few months in a small town like Gilroy,” said Charlie Hawkins, a personal injury lawyer representing the Trejo family. He’s investigating whether the city should be held responsible for the boy’s death. “Statistically that’s one hell of an anomaly.”
Governments are traditionally immune under state law for liability in traffic accidents, Hawkins said, unless it can be shown in court that poor engineering caused an accident, or that public officials ignored warning signs about the dangers of a road. Hawkins and his partner Paul Caputo have hired an engineering consultant to review the intersection where Trejo died, and they plan to investigate if the city or school district received complaints about the site. Family and friends claim a left turn signal at the intersection would have saved the young boy’s life.
Last year, Hawkins and Caputo won a $2.1-million jury award against the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority for the agency’s failure to require disabled passengers to securely strap down their wheelchairs. The partners have about a month to finish their investigation and file a lawsuit against the city in the Trejo accident.
“We have not decided whether or not we are going to proceed against the city in the Trejo case,” Hawkins said, though it remains a possibility.
But when it comes to public safety, lawyers aren’t the only ones casting a suspicious eye at the role of the city and school district.
Tina Baty said her 11-year-old son Eric was struck by a driver last week at the intersection of Sixth and Hanna streets. He escaped with a bruised knee. But Baty said she had complained to the school district numerous times in the past, before her son was injured, about the lack of crossing guards near Brownell Middle School. Baty said the Gilroy Unified School District board members turned down her offer to serve as a crossing guard for the high school, saying it posed “a liability.”
“With the growth, they should have a better grasp of what’s going on – and they don’t,” Baty said.
In the wake of Gonzalez’ death, some parents are calling for additional school crossing guards and many are volunteering to provide the service. In most cities, police departments are responsible for hiring crossing guards, but in Gilroy, the responsibility rests with the school district, said superintendent Edwin Diaz. The agency currently has 12 positions, four of them are vacant. None are assigned to the scene of the latest accident, Welburn Avenue, an artery through northern Gilroy that connects commuters with Santa Teresa Boulevard to the west, and freeway entrances off Leavesley Road to the east.
This morning, Diaz, Rod Kelley principal Luis Carrillo, and a school resource officer will meet at the intersection to assess the situation following parents’ requests to volunteer as crossing guards. The intersection hasn’t been mentioned in the past by the groups that recommend crossing guard locations, according to district safety officer Roger Cornia.
“I personally don’t think there’s an issue with volunteers as long as they receive some training and they understand their role and their limits,” Diaz said.
Gilroy Unified School District has a $30,440 district-wide budget for crossing guards, he said. The district is also reviewing its Safe Routes to School plan, and convening traffic safety assemblies for students. Rod Kelley Elementary School will have its assembly this Friday, led by Gilroy police officers.
Meanwhile, the city has hired a consultant to design a left-turn signal for the site of the Trejo accident. The project will require replacing the entire light pole and arm stretching across the intersection, and will likely cost between $250,000 and $300,000, according to City Transportation Engineer Don Dey. He predicted the design work should wrap up in two months, while funds would not be available until the next fiscal year, sometime after June 2007.
But many accidents aren’t the result of poor road engineering, said Dey.
“The nature of the collision is more attributed to driver or pedestrian error than it is that there was some fault of the road engineering,” he said.
Hawkins and Caputo also questioned whether Gilroy police are doing enough to stop speedy drivers. Gilroy hasn’t had a dedicated traffic officer since about May of 2005, when Joseph Crivello was promoted. Patrol officers still write an average of 10 traffic tickets each day, said Sgt. Kurt Svardal, but traffic stops come second to calls for service. The department is currently training two officers to fill vacancies, Svardal said, but neither will become the traffic officer, a specialized position.
Training will wrap up in six to 10 weeks, after which the department will consider filling the traffic officer position.
“The one traffic position we’ve had has had to go vacant,” Svardal said. “Specialty assignments like traffic are extremely important, but the patrol officer is the backbone of the department, and those have to be filled first.”
In the past three years, Gilroy police have issued five citations for jaywalking, 1,266 citations for failures to stop at signs or signals, and 1,966 speeding tickets, according to police statistics.
Mayor Al Pinheiro and Gilroy City Councilman Craig Gartman said the city must look into reinstating its traffic control officer. Yet they questioned whether any measures – a new traffic signal or beefed-up traffic enforcement – could have prevented the string of recent tragedies.
“We as a city need to take some steps to try to enforce some of the speed laws and get people to stop at stop signs,” Gartman said. “But I don’t believe that these are accidents that the city could have avoided. Sometimes there are just tragic accidents that occur.”
Svardal agreed. The driver who struck Gonzalez wasn’t speeding. She obeyed a stop sign, and looked both ways. But somehow, she didn’t see the young boy.
“It’s a huge tragedy,” Svardal said, but “if we had an officer sitting at that stop sign at that time … how could enforcement have prevented that?”
