It was bitterly familiar: A friend’s sister had been struck and killed instantly in early June as she walked her bike along a roadside in rural Louisiana.
Biddle Duke, former publisher of the Stowe Reporter and Waterbury Record. Courtesy of Stowe Reporter
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Lisi Oliver taught in the English department at Louisiana State University, spoke or read 16 languages, was a passionate thespian and a pre-eminent English law expert. She played the ukulele; she sang to patients at a local hospital. Everywhere she went, Lisi Oliver seemed to cast her special light.
Yet the driver of the truck did not see her pushing her broken bicycle. For now, it’s being called an “accident.”
“I am overwhelmed with disbelief,” Oliver’s brother Peter, a Waitsfield writer, wrote sharply but with resignation to his friends when he heard the news (Peter is the author of “Stowe: Classic New England”).
I know Peter’s pain — the sense of sudden, overwhelming grief, the helplessness.
It’s been 20 years since my dad was struck and killed by a car while inline skating on a rural lane on Long Island. The moment haunts me, triggered by the news of a cyclist’s or pedestrian’s death — three cyclists have been killed in Vermont this year — or by the rumble of traffic coming up behind me when I’m on my bike.
I’d never seen the police work about the crash on April 29, 1995, that killed my dad, partly because my mother asked me not to. Dad was gone, she would say, so what was the point? I never pressed it.
Instead, I engaged in a very personal protest. The facts as I knew them were that he had been run over from behind, and it was entirely avoidable. So, whenever I discussed what ended Dad’s life, I would never use the word “accident.” You hold these burning embers forever, or you deal with them.
This spring, near the 20th anniversary of Dad’s death, I dug into it. I sought the incident records, and I talked to family and friends about it, and how the accident pushed my mother into the difficult and heart-breaking decision to leave the little town where the accident occurred and they had lived for years.
Dad was 79 when he was killed. It was a little before 5 on a clear Saturday evening. I was living in Argentina when I got the call from my brother Jeffrey. Dad and I had spoken that morning — he’d cautioned me about the critical tone of a recent article of mine. My wife and I were preparing dinner in Buenos Aires for our 2-year-old daughter. My wife was pregnant with our son; we would name him Angie, after his grandfather, upon his birth later that year.
Press accounts in the days that followed cited the cause of his death briefly, but merely as the event that instantly ended a big and bright life. Angier Biddle Duke’s death wasn’t the story — his life was: How he’d worked in the Kennedy White House as chief of protocol, and how, as one of the administration’s public faces, he’d been at the center of world events. Dad would serve as U.S. ambassador to four nations on three continents, and made international refugee relief and democracy building his life’s work.
The response to his death was an outpouring of affection and admiration. More than a thousand people turned out for the memorial service. Although cloaked in grief, those days radiated with joy and pride, which helped contain my confusion and anger at the fact that he’d been killed on the street near his home, ending his life before it should have ended.
I should have been there a few weeks later when Mom had a fateful visit with the village police in Southampton, where the accident occurred. The police had been at the scene, and at the hospital, and we assumed they’d conducted an investigation. We didn’t know for sure. We’d never heard from them. Mom took matters into her own hands and called the police chief directly and made an appointment.
Mom asked to know what happened; it was all downhill from there. “The chief told me people never come and ask such things, nor do they ever want to see the police report. Nor do the police ever contact the victim’s family.”
Mom should have said “nonsense” but she was too stunned, too shattered still to have that strength.
A detective joined them, she recalled. He said almost nothing: “He just observed.” Mom asked questions. The chief demurred, saying as little as possible. Life can turn on little things like just the right, kind words. She would write later: “I will never know what truly happened. … I was crushed by the whole experience.” This would not be the only reason, but it contributed to her decision to sell our home and move away.
This spring, I obtained the police records and witness reports that none of us had seen. It took two Freedom of Information Act requests, and still I didn’t get everything. But it was enough. I met with the lieutenant at the department at the time and who has since left the force. David Betts told me what I knew to be true: “We should have called the family. I knew we didn’t call you. And we should have.”
Dad was an eternally optimistic guy, a risk-taker with an invincibility complex. At 79, he inline skated helmetless, with ankle weights, while listening to John Philip Sousa on his Walkman. He probably didn’t hear the three cars approaching from behind that day.
The first car swung a wide arc and went around him, but the second car, according to the reports, took a tighter line, Betts explained, and demonstrated with the help of the documents I’d obtained that Dad took a long stride into the side of the second car. That was it.
It was an accident. But here’s the thing: Calling this or any pedestrian or cyclist death an “accident” doesn’t absolve drivers. America’s high rate of cyclist and pedestrian deaths is due to bad roads, a lack of dedicated cycling and running lanes, but also a reluctance to hold drivers responsible when they cut it too tight. In parts of Europe, where “share the road” is more than just a slogan, the more powerful vehicle is always assumed at fault unless proven otherwise. If a cyclist hits a pedestrian, he is automatically assumed at fault. If a car hits a cyclist or a pedestrian, the driver is automatically assumed at fault.
Until that’s the stance in America, drivers will continue to ignore the rule about clearance for people along the side of the road. And avoidable, deadly “accidents” will continue to happen too often.
Although Mom was an avid inline skater, too, she never again put on her skates. I stubbornly and almost daily embrace the simple, genius thrill of riding a bicycle. I do it for the fun and the exercise, and I’m bolstered by the fearlessness I got from Dad, but always with the keen but terrible awareness that every vehicle that passes me is death avoided.