There’s another kind of violence crisis in Philly: traffic deaths

The pain in the voices of Luis Cabrera and Hector Morales felt familiar, not unlike the anguish I’ve heard from parents I’ve talked to who’ve lost children to gun violence.

But when I spoke with them this week, they described a loss of a different kind.

Cabrera’s son, 38-year-old Christopher Cabrera, had been waiting to cross the street at the intersection of Frankford and East Allegheny Avenues on July 17 when, police said, a man in a black Toyota sped through the intersection, struck the younger Cabrera, and killed him.

Now the father, who learned of his son’s death while at their family’s home in Puerto Rico, was making funeral arrangements and trying to find the earliest flight back home to Philadelphia — all while coming to terms that his son was gone.

In Philadelphia, Morales was living through a similar nightmare after his toddler, 23-month-old Madison Yuliet Morales, who was in her stroller, was fatally struck by a pickup truck on July 20 while crossing the intersection of North Front Street and West Wyoming Avenue with her mother and two siblings, who are still recovering from their own injuries.

“This is an indescribable kind of grief,” Morales told me when we spoke on Thursday.

When we speak of violence in our city, our discussions are often centered around gun violence, which, despite a drop in shootings over the last three years, still affects thousands of Philadelphians every day. But when we talk about deaths that occur on our roadways, we still view them as “accidents,” no matter how preventable they might have been.

Even Mayor Cherelle L. Parker — who, in her first budget, cut funding to the Vision Zero traffic safety program, which is designed to help decrease pedestrian deaths — called them “accidents” in a statement about three separate crashes in one day that killed Cabrera, critically injured another man, and killed Barbara Friedes, a young doctor riding her bike near Rittenhouse Square.

We almost never refer to pedestrian crashes as what they are: part of another epidemic of death and serious injuries that claim the lives of Philadelphians.

Friedes, a 30-year-old pediatric oncology resident at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, had done everything right while cycling home after an outing with her husband — police said she was wearing a helmet, and riding in a designated bike lane — when she was killed by a suspected drunk driver.

Her death rightfully outraged the city and ignited a wave of renewed calls for improvements among safe streets advocates, who held a vigil where hundreds gathered to mourn her.

But I would do a disservice to the platform this column affords me if I didn’t do my part to also amplify the stories of Cabrera and Madison, whose recent deaths in traffic collisions have not received quite as much public attention as Friedes.

I have also had the privilege of holding this platform long enough to know that the number of news stories about an event shouldn’t be taken as a declaration about the general public’s sense of empathy or level of concern. But it’s hard not to see it as one more disparity — in a long line of racial disparities that persist in our city, from our delivery rooms to our classrooms, from our health systems to our criminal justice systems … and streets.

I was glad to see that most stories about Friedes’ death also included at least a mention of other traffic deaths that day — but it would be naive not to point out that care and attention are often still very much dependent on the race of a person, or how much money they make, or the zip code where they live.

Friedes was a white doctor who was killed in a well-to-do section of Center City, and we should be offended by how she died. Cabrera and Madison, members of the city’s Latino community, deserve that same level of indignation. The Morales family has started a GoFundMe to help with the costs related to her funeral.

Before 2020, Black and Latino residents in Philadelphia accounted for a disproportionate share of traffic deaths.

In Philly, Black and Hispanic residents have borne the brunt of traffic deaths since 2020.

According to an annual report from Vision Zero, from 2016 to 2020, an average of 47 Black Philadelphians and 34 Latinos were killed in traffic accidents each year. In 2021, that number rose to 74 and 34, respectively. Rates of traffic deaths are 57% higher for residents living in the city’s lowest-income zip codes compared with the city’s highest-income zip codes.

Since then, the disparity has grown. In Philly, Black and Hispanic residents have borne the brunt of traffic deaths since 2020, but only a few of those cases rise to the level of attention they probably deserve.

Hector Morales, who works in construction, said he came to the United States from Guatemala more than a decade ago with the intention of working hard and making a better life for his children with his wife, Josseline Patricia Salazar, who cleans houses part time. But in an instant, he said, someone who behaved so irresponsibly, with so little regard for others, destroyed his dream. “My heart has been broken,” he said. “There are just so many feelings I have that I cannot even name right now.”

When Luis Cabrera talked about making the funeral arrangements for his son from Puerto Rico, I mentioned how logistically difficult that must have been. But Cabrera said it wasn’t; he’d made the same arrangements for his eldest son four years earlier. Christopher’s brother, and Luis’ namesake, died after falling and suffering a head injury while he was sick. So the father called on the same funeral home, the same church, and the same cemetery.

His sons will be buried next to each other. The only difference, Cabrera said, is the color of their caskets. The family chose metallic blue for Luis, a fashionable guy who always stood out. For Christopher, they decided on white — a symbol of how he had retained a sense of innocence about him throughout his all-too-short life.