Tim Steller's column: Drugs a factor in Tucson pedestrian deaths

For a decade, I’ve been banging the drum about Tucson’s car culture, arguing it is killing vulnerable pedestrians and cyclists.

“In Tucson, lives of walkers, bicyclists are cheap” said the headline on my first column about the issue, in 2013.

I wasn’t the only one to notice. Over these years, civic groups and government officials took similar stands and started trying to retrofit our car-oriented city into one that is safer and more inviting for walkers and riders.

The problem, though, seemed only to get worse, accelerating especially during the pandemic years. Nationwide, many people emerged from isolation reckless and aggressive on the roads. And last year was a catastrophe for local pedestrians: 49 people killed in the city of Tucson, 70 total in Pima County.

The drivers and the road design remain a big part of the problem, I’m convinced, leading naturally to speeding down wide avenues. But recent data starts to prove a point many people have made to me over the years: It’s also the pedestrians’ fault, perhaps even more so during this latest surge.

The Pima County Medical Examiner’s Office has been looking closer at the issue as they noticed dozens of struck pedestrians brought into the morgue — so many more than before. What they detailed in a new report is, to me, surprisingly clear.

It appears that most of the people who died on Tucson-area streets last year were on hard drugs — methamphetamine and/or fentanyl.

The medical examiner’s office was able to get toxicology results on 51 people who died while walking in Pima County last year. Of those 51 victims, 30 were positive for methamphetamine, and 21 were positive for fentanyl — that’s 59 percent positive for meth and 41 percent for fentanyl.

This doesn’t mean that all 51 were high on one or the other of these drugs, because some victims were positive for both. But it does mean a surprisingly large proportion of those killed were likely high. (To make matters more complicated, the medical examiner’s office examined 72 total pedestrian deaths, but two of the collisions occurred outside Pima County.)

There is nothing about the remaining victims, those who did not have toxicology tests, to suggest they would show different results, said Medical Examiner Dr. Greg Hess. Some, for example, simply died days or weeks after the collision.

“People are on drugs they shouldn’t be on,” Hess told me. “I’m sure it’s affecting people’s decision making processes.”

That makes addressing the problem harder, he noted.

“What can you do when people are stumbling around on fentanyl and methamphetamine?”

‘Midblock crossing’ a factor

These figures won’t come as a surprise to many Tucson drivers, who often complain about people wandering into traffic, especially at night.

Over the years, I’ve had my own experiences of this, but I’ve also been cautious not to put total faith in what drivers say. Behind the wheel, people have a tendency to think they own the road, that no one else belongs, and any incident is the other person’s fault.

If you comb through Tucson police news releases about pedestrian deaths and review the medical examiner’s report, you’ll find that relatively few of those killed were in marked or unmarked crosswalks — 13 out of the total last year.

In fact, Tucson police frequently cite “midblock crossing” as a principal cause of pedestrian deaths.

I have my quibbles with this blame-placing. When crossing our main arteries, I sometimes cross midblock. It’s not out of laziness or being a scofflaw, but because that seems like the safest option: You only have to look one way to get to the median, then you look the other way to get across the street.

But legally speaking, this strategic choice means that if I get struck, I’ll probably be blamed.

Drivers often flee

Of course, that won’t be the case if the driver leaves the scene. And that happened a lot last year: In 37 percent of the pedestrian deaths, the driver fled, the medical examiner’s report says.

Take the case of Nathan Ramonett. On Nov. 16, Tucson police reported in a press release that Ramonett, 42, had been struck by a vehicle in the 1400 block of South Craycroft Road and died.

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“Detectives located narcotics and narcotic paraphernalia in the pedestrian’s possession,” the release said.

Then the story took a twist: “Midblock crossing is the major contributing factor in the collision; however, leaving the scene of a fatal collision by the suspect driver is the focus of the investigation.”

They announced they were looking for a “dark-colored, early 2000’s Chevrolet or GMC SUV” as the suspect vehicle. They still haven’t found the driver.

Ramonett’s toxicology report shows he was positive for methamphetamine, fentanyl and THC, the psychoactive component of marijuana.

We don’t know in this case or others whether the driver was impaired, and probably never will. By the time they’re arrested, there’s not likely to be evidence to convict them of DUI.

Impaired driving hard to quantify

Consider an earlier death, that of Manfred Rivas, who was 49 when he died while crossing in the 3200 block of North Stone Avenue. It was, perhaps not coincidentally, New Year’s Eve, 2021 at about 6 p.m.

Tucson police described what happened this way:

“Mr. Rivas was not in a crosswalk when he was struck by a white passenger vehicle that was traveling northbound in the curb lane. After striking Mr. Rivas, the white passenger vehicle continued northbound and did not stop. Moments later, a second vehicle struck the pedestrian as he was lying in the roadway. The second vehicle also failed to remain at the scene.”

What a horrible incident. Six days later, Tucson police arrested Roberto Alfredo Lara, then 35, and accused him of driving the second car, striking Rivas on the ground before leaving the scene.

It took more than a year for police to find the suspected first driver. On Wednesday, Tucson police arrested William Lee Wesselink, 68, accusing him of driving the Nissan Rogue that first struck Rivas, leaving the scene, and tampering with evidence.

Meanwhile, a toxicology report found that Rivas was positive for methamphetamine and had a blood alcohol level about three times the legal limit for driving, at 0.24 percent.

So, what about the condition of the drivers who kill pedestrians? We know a few are impaired and get arrested for it, and a large number are not because police check them at the scene. But some unknown number likely flee because they were impaired.

I have no idea, of course, if this is the case with the two separate drivers, Lara and Wesselink, accused of hitting the same man on New Year’s Eve and driving away.

Why are more pedestrians dying?

When I shared the Pima County Medical Examiner’s report with Arlie Adkins, an associate professor of urban planning at the UA, he cautioned me not to overinterpret the results.

Adkins is an advocate for walkability and has researched racial and socioeconomic disparities in pedestrian safety.

“There’s no question that understanding connections between substance abuse and pedestrian fatalities is important, locally and nationally,” Adkins said via text. “Given the stigma attached to meth in particular, being overly focused on that stat might distract from the larger concern abot roadway safety for everyone — kids, college students learning to be adults and, yeah, drug users.”

He also noted the surprising figure on homelessness in the report. In Pima County, just 29 percent of the people struck and killed were homeless; 71 percent were not. That’s the inverse of Portland, Oregon in 2021: That year, 70 percent of the 27 pedestrians killed in Portland were homeless.

Based on Tucson police accounts and the medical examiner’s report, we can say the typical pedestrian killed in traffic last year was male, housed and crossing a main street outside of a crosswalk in the nighttime hours — all things we knew pretty well before.

But now we know this person was also probably high on meth or fentanyl. And that may go a long way toward explaining why so many more pedestrians are dying.

Tim Steller is an opinion columnist. A 25-year veteran of reporting and editing, he digs into issues and stories that matter in the Tucson area, reports the results and tells you his conclusions. Contact him at tsteller@tucson.com or 520-807-7789. On Twitter: @senyorreporter