Cobb prosecution of grieving mother becomes rallying cry for pedestrian safety

The story of a Marietta pedestrian who may serve more time for the traffic death of her son than the beer-swigging, hit-and-run driver who killed him has drawn little attention in Georgia.

Nationally though, it’s becoming a parable for transportation planning that virtually forces pedestrians to take unacceptable risks — in this case, a fatal one.

The bus stops (located on both sides) of Austell Road and the path taken by Raquel Nelson across Austell Road to get from the bus stop to her apartments across the street. No marked crossings are visible in the photo. Reprinted with permission from Transportation for America.

Raquel Nelson, the 30-year-old mother, had arrived with her three children at the bus stop across from their apartment on Austell Road after dark on a long day of chores and events. Rather than walk some 600 yards to the next crosswalk, she and other passengers did what they usually do at that bus stop: They scurried across the divided highway.

Nelson and her children made it to the median. But her son darted ahead, following some adults who were crossing during an opening in the traffic. He didn’t make it. A van driven by Jerry L. Guy hit the boy, who later died from his injuries. The mother, carrying her two-year-old, suffered injuries in the process of trying to protect her boy.

Guy drove away from the scene. He later was arrested and charged with vehicular homicide, cruelty to children and hit-and-run. But a Cobb judge threw out the first two of those charges. Then, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, when Guy pleaded guilty, he

confessed to having consumed “a little” alcohol earlier in the day, being prescribed pain medication and being partially blind in his left eye, said David Simpson, his attorney.

The AJC’s Elsie Hitchcock also learned that Guy had been convicted for two-hit-and-runs on the same day back in 1997:

The first hit-and-run also happened on Austell Road, but when Guy fled from that scene he hit another car, seriously injuring that driver and passenger, records show.

In the Raquel Nelson case, Guy was released on probation after serving six months of a five-year-sentence. What happened next, though, is what really enraged pedestrian and transportation advocates.

Cobb prosecutors charged her with second degree vehicular homicide — a more serious charge than the driver ended up facing — and last week Nelson was convicted. I’ll let my friend, former Atlantan, David Goldberg, who wrote Monday about the case on the Transportation for America blog, take it from here.

Nelson, 30 and African-American, was convicted on the charge … by six jurors who were not her peers: All were middle-class whites, and none had ever taken a bus in metro Atlanta. In other words, none had ever been in Nelson’s shoes:

They had never taken two buses to go grocery shopping at Wal-Mart with three kids in tow. They had never missed a transfer on the way home that caused them to wait a full hour-and-a-half with tired and hungry kids for the next bus. They had never been let off at a bus stop on a five-lane speedway, with their apartment in sight across the road, and been asked to drag those three little ones an additional half-mile-plus down the road to the nearest traffic signal and back in order to get home at last.

And they had never lost control of an over-eager four-year-old as they waited on a three-foot median for a car to pass. Nor had they watched helplessly as a driver who had had “three or four” beers and two painkillers barreled toward their child.

But — quite appropriately, I think — Goldberg reserves his harshest criticism for those responsible for the physical environment that led to the accident:

What about the highway designers, traffic engineers, transit planners and land use regulators who allowed a bus stop to be placed so far from a signal and made no other provision for a safe crossing; who allowed – even encouraged, with wide, straight lanes – prevailing speeds of 50-plus on a road flanked by houses and apartments; who carved a fifth lane out of a wider median that could have provided more of a safe refuge for pedestrians; who designed the entire landscape to be hostile to people trying to get to work and groceries despite having no access to a car?

Nelson’s story turned into a cause celebre over the last few days on national blogs and on websites from as  far away as Oregon, Ottawa and London. Grist columnist Sarah Goodyear wrote a particularly powerful column about it yesterday, and Forbes blogger E.D. Kain is following the story closely.

Other than that short article in the AJC and spot-on comments by Sally Flocks, executive director of the PEDS pedestrian advocacy group, however, Atlantans have been pretty silent on a story that reflects so deeply on the metro area’s physical environment.