Portland-based lawyer and bicycle law specialist Charley Gee needs our help.
Gee represents a man who was struck by someone driving a car as he biked in the bike lane on North Interstate Avenue on August 15th. The person driving the car didn’t render aid or wait around for help to arrive at the scene. The victim needs information about the suspect to help his case.
Here’s more about the incident from Gee:
“After being struck and knocked to the ground, the car driver stopped, rolled down his window and laughed at the injured man before leaving the scene.
The car is described as a gold sedan. The driver was a male. The bicyclist is a middle-aged African American male. He suffered severe injuries due to the collision.”
Unfortunately the nearby MAX platform was unable to produce video footage of the collision.
If you have any information about what happened or were there to witness it, please get in touch with Gee as soon as possible via email – cgee@injuryoregon.com or (503) 278-5389.
— Jonathan Maus, (503) 706-8804 – jonathan@bikeportland.org
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Maybe we can bring back good old fashioned bounty’s from the wild west. ” Wanted, dead or alive, laughing male in a gold sedan. This type of crime makes my blood boil and the culprit deserves to meet justice.
A cynical co-worker of mine just blurted out, that ” you do not know the whole story”. I admitted that seems the case by the post as it is here…. What else do we know about the incident? I have never had issue at that spot, although others have..
This intersection is difficult for a lot of drivers. The crosswalk is typically very busy, which makes it difficult to turn right when you have a green light. You also have to worry about cyclists coming up on your right. Even though the bike lane indicates a right-only for cyclists, some do continue straight to go on the Steel Bridge. After drivers miss the green cycle, they then try to turn right on red. You have to look left for cars and cyclists, and the view will sometimes be partially obstructed by Trimet Busses. Even after you know you are clear to the left, you will start your turn only to realize that pedestrians are now crossing against the signal to get to the MAX platform. I’m not surprised that there was an incident here, but that is obviously no excuse for the driver.
I’m often the first one to be skeptical but it’s a busy area with issues that could cause a cyclist exercising reasonable caution to get in trouble.
Having said that, more info would be helpful. All we have is a request more than a month after the fact is to look for a male who might be driving a gold sedan. We don’t really even have a description of the accident.
Unless they already have a suspect and need corroborating evidence, it would be hard to be useful.
what color car does your co-worker drive? their comments makes me think it’s gold… or maybe their friend has a gold car…
Based on the comment, it sounds like the coworker is a male, too! Let’s string him up!
What kind of car does your co-worker drive?
“A cynical co-worker of mine just blurted out, that ” you do not know the whole story”. …” longgone
What was, in your co-worker’s opinion, ‘the whole story’? Not clear from your post, whether the co-worker actually had some useful information, or not.
Does your co-worker know that a good forum for learning thew whole story is a court of law, where both parties can tell their story and offer evidence? The request was for information that could permit the bicyclist to have their day in a court of law so we can learn the whole story.
Glad everyone is in agreement.
“I have never had issue at that spot”
Oh, well, then I guess we should all move along?
Sounds like two cynical co-workers….
Wow… all of you are off the hook. I was sort of taken back by my co-workers comment. That person is a female, btw. I have no idea what, or even if she drives a car.
@ 9watts…It is true, having lived in North Portland for 13 years, and riding this section of road nearly daily… my experience has been that it isn’t really all that stressful.
I acknowledge that others do not see it that way .
Often I agree with your comments. Sometimes I do not. My comment was made out of concern for the injured cyclist. Maybe you should consider that.
I comment here so seldom anymore because a few dedicated ding dongs make it seem that all of the cyclists in Portland share the same candy ass opinions.
Portland needs a new forum that simply reports things of interest for cyclists and is free of a comment section.
90% of my cycling friends laugh heartily just at the mention of this site.
happy cycling, everyone !
What kind of forum has no comments?
Touché. No forum.
the kind candy asses avoid, obviously.
Some people don’t want to think about or question ideas about difficult situations that different people put forth, different than their own. It would seem they prefer to be presented with views that correspond primarily with their own personal view, regardless of what are the details of a given situation.
When someone posts a comment about traffic collision, or asks a question about one, it helps when they offer as many details as they can, about the collision. That in turn helps people to understand the situation referred to, and can maybe even spark the recollection of the collision in the mind of someone that may have witnessed the collision or something of it, and has either forgotten or didn’t realize until the mention…what they saw.
The amount of stress a given road poses to road users, varies from road user to road user. Not the same for every person.
There is hope then. There may be more sane cyclists in this town than I thought.
My friends sometimes ask me why I waste so much time here. But there’s enough news here that doesn’t appear elsewhere or is hard to find that it still is justified.
The problem with bikeportland is that it seems to cater to mostly non cyclists in my opinion. Not really non cyclists but “coffee shop” cyclists.
People who use bikes for pleasure mostly (which is fine), but do not represent the kind of urban transit cycling that is my ideal.
A city where the number one goal should be to make cycling a real transportation option and not just a place where people ride orange bikes around the waterfront and that is labeled a Portland Cycling success story.
Where dressing up and doing zany neighborhood rides is considered Portland bike culture….
How about we start working on and celebrating real bicycle commuting, developing longer distance commuter routes where cycling really works in this city if we just let people in on the secret that long distance commuting is not hard or even time consuming.
I commute 13-15 mile each way to work almost the entire city each day. it takes no longer than driving and is physically not that demanding. (I am 62 years old.)
Yesterday I rode from Washington sq. at Hall to NE Portland near Grant high school in about an hour on streets where I never had to be with cars traveling over 25 mph. I used the Fanno creek trail, quiet residential beaverton streets, the Sylvan bike path, Washington park and the Johnson and Tillamook greenways for 95% of the 17 mile ride.
These are the kind of routes that need to be advertised and worked on. Routes that people can really use for commuting and commerce.
Instead the focus on this site is the half mile circle around downtown where hipsters can get to the coffee shops in a green painted bike lane traveling 5-10 mph.
That is recreation, not transportion.
Same reasons here.
I have to admit being baffled by the getting rid of comments concept. It seems simple enough that if one does not like the comments portion all you have to do is not read them. I don’t like the comments on Oregon Live but I can read the articles and ignore the comments. I would also like to hear an elaboration on the label of “candy ass”. Is that some kind of code word for , ” toughen up and ignore the deaths and injuries caused by criminals in motor cars.” Or is it code for ,” Only whimps and Pansy’s get hit by cars cause real men ride so fast the cars can’t catch them”. Throwing out dog whistle statements without a bit of support for your position seems a bit lowbrow and retrograde to me.
Another car-centric statement. How we react to each other is more important than many realize. The fact that the driver laughed after hitting a severely injured cyclist, overrides any other condition present. If it wasn’t intentional, why didn’t he stop and render aid?
In all honesty, I sometimes have trouble interpreting reports here.
There are certainly a few miscreant drivers out there, but the representation of events here is consistently melodramatic and the drivers are outright cartoonish. There is hardly ever any information about cyclists and what they did during the situation. If anyone asks, they get accused of victim blaming.
Weird stuff happens out there. But the atmosphere here makes it tricky to tell what’s real and what’s part of a narrative.
How dare you be rational and objective!
no it wasn’t.
Perhaps the driver hadn’t heard Commissioner Novick’s press statement on exercising personal responsibility.
That is a pretty rare color. I think the driver who killed Fallon Smart drove a car with that color …
Too bad they have waited so long to reach out to the larger community…as memories fade or people leave town etc.
Perhaps the extent of medical injuries hasn’t become clear until now, or insurance refuses to pay, taking a month or so to count beans first.
only 20 comments since Sep 29th.
wow.
i can only assume we are reaching some sort of burnout levels where these types of stories no longer affect us, huh?!?
super unfortunate.
NAGL.