Sidewalk memorials remind public of pedestrains hit and killed
PIX11
March 16, 2013
By Magee Hickey

http://pix11.com/2013/03/16/sidewalk-memorials-remind-public-of-pedestri…

You may be walking down the street and see what looks like a chalk drawing, the outline of a body, you may wonder what’s the story.

Here’s the answer.

An anonymous group of cyclists stenciled these body outlines where eight pedestrians or cyclists were killed in the last year by drivers who didn’t face any criminal charges.

“In all of these cases, the automobile was violating at least one traffic violation,” Time’s Up organizer Keegan Stephan told PIX 11. “And yet the NYPD showed up and declared there was no criminality suspected within the first few hours. And they haven’t released the accident investigation reports to the public or the victims’ family.

Each spray-painted silhouette has a story to tell like Mike’s, a UPS worker killed on the sidewalk at 15 Beekman Street in lower Manhattan.

“He was standing on the sidewalk about to deliver a package,” Stephan said, when a car jumped the curb and killed Mike.

The group Time’s Up is frustrated by the NYPD’s investigation of crashes. After a series of council hearings, this week the NYPD agreed to change the name from accident investigation squad to collision investigation squad and look at the 3-thousand cases each year where pedestrians and cyclists are injured as well as killed.

“AIS, now CIS, is only going to increase by 10 people, now it’s 10 people,” Stephan said. “It doesn’t seem feasible.”

People walking by the spray-painted silhouettes were moved by the body images.

“This is a great way to raise awareness,” Clarke Bliss said. “It’s a shocking image.”

Another person, Judy Hunter said, “I don’t want to step on it. It looks sacred.”