A person died on my street tonite…
Yes, I’m writing this at nearly 3AM.
We live on the corner of a fairly busy feeder street to Anderson Mill Road here outside Austin. The speed limit is 35 and the road is about 3/4 of a mile long. There are a few bends in it but no stop signs for its entire length. It is fed by several side streets, and has a couple schools on it. People think it’s a speedway. I regularly see folks doing 50+ and often over 60 down this street. In the 9+ years we’ve lived here we’ve seen no less than a dozen accidents occur from our house. Mostly due to speed but there were a couple of drunks tossed in there. Racing isn’t too uncommon either, which leads me to tonite.
I heard something outside about 2:30 but it wasn’t loud enough to investigate. It didn’t have the trademark carwreck sounds. I’ve heard enough late at night to know when it’s time to jump out of bed with my phone ready to dial 911. Less than 5 minutes later I heard the sirens and saw lights passing my window. I got up to investigate. There were about 6-7 emergency vehicles parked a block up from my house. I grabbed my camera and walked up to see what happened this time.
There was a motorcycle laying in a heap on the sidewalk on the outside of a bend. It looked like they laid it down and hit a trashcan. EMS was loading the rider into the truck. He was moving and didn’t look to be bleeding too bad.
As I was talking to the neighbor about what he’d heard a deputy walked up from behind us. I turned to ask him what happened and noticed that he was trying to wipe blood off his uniform. He said that the guy they were loading should be fine but the other was DOA. We both looked at him and said ‘other guy?’ He pointed over the fence and said there was another bike in the backyard of the house. I peeked over the fence and saw another bike smashed against the back of the house. ‘Oh shit.’ There was blood everywhere and the typical sheet over a body. Against a brick wall, even a rider wearing all his gear is gonna lose.
I started to take pics of the scene to document it for the POA when another deputy came up and asked if I was taking pictures. I told him ‘Of course’. He told me not to take any more as it’s not the time to do so. I told him ‘It’s _exactly_ the time to do so and I’ve tried in the past to get speedhumps on this road to slow idiots down. The more evidence to do so the better our case. I’m a photographer and this is a public street. There’s nothing that says I can’t take photos.’ He looked at me and said with all the blood and such that it not appropriate. I just looked at him making no move to stop what I was doing. He had tried the intimidation route and saw I wasn’t buying it. That’s when he visibly dropped the authority figure persona that many cops have when on duty and then said the magic words, ‘Please, out of respect for the dead, will you stop taking photos? I can’t tell you to stop but I’m asking as a human being.’ I told him ‘I’d rather not but since you’re asking out of respect, I will stop.’
I know I’m a bad photographer for stopping but a cop had the decency to ask me nicely instead of trying to force me to stop. So I did. I also voluntarily erased all the pics but one taken from a distance that just shows a downed bike.
Please, for all that is good and holy, slow down on neighborhood streets. There are kids playing out there. A person died tonite because he thought it’d be great fun to race. It’s sad, yes, but also I know that that’s one less speeder to worry about and that he took only himself out in the process and not some innocent bystander.