Tragedy Signals Need for Crusade

First, there was the phone call.

“Mrs. Peterson? Travis has been in an accident. We need you down here right now.”

Each moment deepened the horror.

There were the firetrucks and police cars and ambulances, a battalion of red lights flashing over the roadway Travis had biked across a thousand times, an armada of emergency units staining an ordinary Friday afternoon the color of hell.

There was the nurse at the hospital, placing her arm around Cathy Peterson. “I’ve got to tell you, this is very serious,” she said. “He’s had a major head trauma.”

No, no, Peterson said. They told me he only broke his leg. You’re thinking of someone else.

In a few minutes, she was kneeling by her unconscious 13-year-old son as doctors and nurses toiled over him. She remembers telling him to think of “Rescue 911”--his favorite TV show, and she remembers her desperate encouragements: “I love you, and I’ll always, always be here for you--whatever you need, I’ll be here . . . “

In the hallway, firefighters in their yellow coats milled around. “They were all standing there with this hopeless look on their faces,” recalls Peterson. “I shouted something awful, like: ‘Stop it! Stop looking like that . . . “

That was four years ago.

In the time since, she has led a successful crusade for pedestrian-activated signals at three Simi Valley crosswalks, including the one where a driver hit her son, catapulting him to his death.

Now, when she stops for pedestrians at unsignaled crosswalks--”suicide lanes,” she calls them--she makes sure other drivers stop, too. She stretches her arm out the window, beckoning others to slow down. She leans on her horn. She yells at pedestrians to watch it, watch themselves, watch the traffic.

When she sees kids bicycling without helmets, she hails them over.

A time or two, she’s flagged down motorists zipping through crosswalks, unmindful of anyone about to venture into them.

“I’ve got to talk to you,” she says, and without mincing words, she lets them know how easily and suddenly tragedy can strike.

Peterson doesn’t troll for such opportunities, but she doesn’t shy away from them either.

That’s why she volunteered this week to help angry parents of students at Santa Susana Elementary School.

Under pressure from the parents, the city agreed to restore a crosswalk and crossing guard it had eliminated at the school. But many parents also want a button that kids can press to halt traffic.

The city is considering it, but Peterson has no room in her heart for bureaucratic throat-clearing.

“It’s just a no-brainer,” she says. “We might be the safest city when it comes to crime, but not when it comes to traffic safety. Any city that has an unsignaled mid-block crosswalk is guilty of neglect.”

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If city officials disagree, they’ll face a formidable opponent.

Hours after her son’s death, she had a friend take her to the spot on Erringer Road where a 55-year-old motorist plowed into him. The driver later was convicted of misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter and sentenced to 240 hours of community service.

Peterson gazed at a makeshift shrine to Travis, overflowing with flowers, poems, photos, letters. Members of his roller hockey team left their sticks there.

“Behind me I heard tires squealing and cars flying by,” Peterson said. “It just wasn’t right.”

A single mother of two sons, Peterson had never before approached city government for anything. She didn’t even know the mayor’s name.

But she did her homework. Call her obsessed if you want, but her kind of doggedness--phoning City Hall every day, demanding a timetable, demanding action--can make the system turn somersaults, however slowly.

She gathered more than 5,000 signatures on petitions for a traffic signal. She set up a table at the site on weekends, and kept a tally of bikers and pedestrians. She bore witness to any number of near-misses at the crosswalk that claimed her son.

Fueled by grief, she didn’t let up.

She wouldn’t accept the possibility of a flashing light at the crosswalk--a fixture easily ignored and not always understood, she contended.

When a city official suggested that pedestrian-controlled signals could produce rear-end collisions, she was furious.

“Which would you rather deal with--a call from the auto body shop or a call like the one I got?” she asked him.

When the city said it was helpless about installation delays, she challenged officials to let her help. An inventory-control manager at Bugle Boy, she said she’d locate the signal equipment in the company’s warehouse back east, see that it was loaded on to a truck, and accompany the driver across the country to Simi Valley.

The equipment was found without her help.

When a city official proclaimed that no signal could provide a guarantee against accidents, she stormed: “How dare you insult my intelligence! I set the table now for two instead of three. I live every day with the knowledge there are no guarantees in life.”

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She passes the spot on Erringer almost every morning. Her son Eric, now 16, takes her hand. She cries frequently. She thinks daily about the woman who drove the car. In court, the two hugged. “Tell Eric I’m sorry,” the woman whispered.

And, of course, she thinks about the boy who never got to be a man.

When she talks about the parents of Santa Susana Elementary, she grows animated.

“I can’t sit back and do nothing.” she says. “I won’t.”

Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at:steve.chawkins@latimes.com.