A Chicago Tribune investigation into dangers faced by pedestrians and bicyclists from motor vehicles on Chicago’s busy streets has been named the winner of the Third Annual Casey Feldman Award for Transportation Safety Reporting.
Thousands of pedestrians and cyclists have been seriously injured or killed in recent years in Chicago, but in only a fraction of cases have the police charged drivers with violating motor vehicle laws. This apparent lack of enforcement has only added to the risk pedestrians and cyclists face when they venture out onto the streets, the newspaper found.
The article, titled Serious Crashes With Pedestrians and Cyclists Often Fail To Lead To Tickets Or Charges; We Can’t Be Ok With This, focused on two emblematic cases. Nakari Campbell, 18, was run down in August 2023 in a crosswalk just blocks from her West Town Chicago home, and 11-year-old Ja’lon James was killed crossing a street near his home as he walked to a store to buy milk. Campbell was flipped onto the hood of the red Mercedes, fell under the car and was dragged for a time along the street. The driver fled the scene.
Although witnesses gave the police the car’s license plate information, they have yet to make an arrest in the case or file charges.
Campbell, who survived the crash, spent months in rehabilitation and still suffers from injuries she sustained.
The accident is part of a larger pattern in which collisions involving pedestrians and cyclists seem to get short shrift from the Chicago police, the article reported. Of the more than 4,000 crashes in which victims were killed or seriously injured, police issued traffic tickets or filed more serious charges in only 26 percent of the cases.
The Chicago police declined to comment specifically on the newspapers findings, saying only that the department was committed to seeking justice for victims. But the article quoted several transportation safety experts as saying rigorous traffic enforcement is essential to making the streets safer.
The author of the article, Sarah Freishtat, is the Tribune’s transportation reporter. Freishtat said that she began to focus on the subject of motor vehicle crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists after an unusually high volume of crashes. An initial review of the data – traffic citations in such crashes were made only infrequently — only added to the impression that pedestrians were at risk and that safety could be enhanced.
“I had been hearing a lot of concern about this on my beat for months,” Freishtat said. “There was the sense that (motor vehicle crashes with pedestrians) had been an issue for some time but a wave of crashes made it top of mind.”
“I give a lot of credit to the families that I spoke with because it is not easy to sit down and relive what is often the worst day of their lives – and I am deeply appreciative of them letting me into their homes and into their lives,” Freishtat said. “Sitting in Ja’lon’s family living room and talking to his mother and grandmother really drives home why this issue is important to talk about and why we do this.”
For Campbell, the crash has been the source of ongoing emotional and physical trauma. Freishtat reported that after the crash, Campbell always avoided the area near the collision site, and when her mother took her to school, they traveled an alternate route.
There have been ongoing physical effects, as well. The crash caused broken ribs and a broken bone in her neck, missing teeth and scars across her body.
The crash that took the life of Ja’lon James was, like Campbell’s a hit and run. Ja’lon and his brother had gone out to get milk from a corner store in June of 2022. A traffic video obtained by the police showed a car going through a yellow light then hitting Ja’lon as he crossed the street. Ja’lon was dragged halfway down the block. The driver briefly stopped, then took off, according to the police report. At the time of the Tribune report, some 20 months after the crash, the police had not made an arrest.
Apart from some safety improvements to the stretch of road where Campbell was hit, Freishtat said that to date there has been minimal reaction from Chicago officials to her findings. Even so, there are some hopeful signs on the horizon. Under a new ordinance, the city’s transportation department now is required to analyze every fatal crash reported to the police and focus on ways to improve road safety.
The department has found that most traffic deaths in the city involve reckless behavior by drivers. Two thirds of traffic fatalities involved speeding, the Tribune reported.
The award is given by the Casey Feldman Foundation in conjunction with the University of Colorado Boulder’s College of Media, Communication and Information. The award honors Casey Feldman, a 21-year-old communications major and award-winning journalist at Fordham University who was killed July 17, 2009, when she was run over in a crosswalk in Ocean City, New Jersey by a distracted delivery van driver.
Following her death, Casey’s parents, Joel Feldman and Dianne Anderson, created the Casey Feldman Foundation and its sponsored project, EndDD.org to raise public awareness of the dangers of distracted driving and to encourage drivers and passengers to take steps to end the practice.
The problem is pervasive. According to one study by Cambridge Mobile Telematics, which uses proprietary technology to monitor distracted driving behavior for auto insurers and state and local governments, up to 41 percent of car trips involve distracted cell phone usage. Ryan McMahon, vice president for insurance and government affairs at the company, said in 34 percent of car crashes detected by CMT technology, a driver had a cell phone in hand at the time of the crash.
“Traffic deaths in the U.S are at epidemic levels and fatalities for pedestrian and cyclists are off the charts, increasing much faster than roadway deaths in general,” Feldman said. “There has been a lot of attention focused on this crisis, but I don’t think anyone has done a better job in focusing attention on the issue than Sarah Freishtat.”
“This is precisely why we created the Transportation Safety Reporting Award- to highlight the carnage on our roads in the hope that doing so will lead to making our roads safer for all of us,” Feldman said. “We have to tell these stories if we want things to change.”
It is not known whether the drivers of the vehicles that hit Nakari and Ja’lon were using cell phones or engaging in other distracted driving behaviors, but that is in part the point of Freishstat’s reporting: authorities aren’t in a position to evaluate the public safety implications of the crashes because they know so little about them.
Two judges evaluated the submissions for the Casey Feldman award: Justin George, an editor at the Cowboy State Daily, and Chuck Plunkett, who directs the capstone journalism program of CU News Corps at CU Boulder. George was formerly a transportation writer at The Washington Post, and Plunkett had been the editorial page editor of The Denver Post.
Freishtat received a first-place prize of $3,000 and expenses for a trip to Boulder to accept the award and meet with journalism students at CU Boulder.
Reporters Jennifer Gollan and Susie Neilson of the San Francisco Chronicle were recognized with an honorable mention for their reporting on police chases. The multimedia series examined the subject through storytelling, infographics and video.
Chris Mondics
Chris Mondics is a freelance journalist and author based in Philadelphia. Earlier in his career, he was the legal affairs writer for The Philadelphia Inquirer from 2007 through 2017 and had been a Washington correspondent for the newspaper for a decade before that. He focuses much of his work on legal and national security issues, as well as politics and the economy.
