Culture & Community | Goffe Street Park
Top: John Lee, Mary Compton, Waleed Ahmad and Roberto Irizziray, chair of the New Haven Peace Commission. Bottom: Attendees remember 17-year-old Luke Roux, who was killed in 2022. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The names rang out in the fall air, making their way across Goffe Street Park. Sixty-three-year-old Luis Timbila, hit by a car on State Street in the early hours of a warm November morning. Twenty-four-year-old Nicolas Baltazar-Consepcion, struck by a garbage truck at Church Street and North Frontage Road. Seventy-year-old Yusuf Gürsey, a kind-hearted peace activist who was killed on Whalley Avenue while walking home from a demonstration.
The names kept coming. Across the grass, a large sign beside a bike urged Less Talk More Action. Three hundred and forty-two flags, each representing a life lost prematurely, flapped in the wind. For a minute, it felt impossible that the world could just keep going.
Safe streets advocates, elected officials, bereaved families, cyclists, and friends gathered Sunday afternoon to observe the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims (WDR), a global recognition of lives lost to traffic violence each year. Around five dozen people attended, many holding framed photographs of the friends and family members they had lost. Of the politicians who attended, very few suggested tangible action items that they will implement to actually make Connecticut safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
The World Health Organization reports that 1.9 million people die in incidences of traffic violence each year., making it the leading cause of death among people between the ages of five and 29. In the past month alone, that number has very nearly included artist-activist Nika Zarazvand, who was injured after a hit-and-run at Vivan las Autonomas’ Día de Muertos celebration earlier this month.
Zarazvand has been advocating for justice in the case of Roya Mohammadi, whose aunt Khurshida was killed in a hit-and-run in West Haven last year—showing just how intertwined the lives of those lost and injured senselessly by cars may be.
“Each person whose name we remember here today is still making a palpable difference on the world,” said Rev. Heidi Thorsen, assistant rector at Trinity Church on the Green. Just last week, a 63-year-old man was hit and critically injured within half a block of the church while crossing Chapel Street. “We are woven together in the moves we make through the world … remember that these are human beings.”
Since WDR on Nov. 19 of last year, Watch for Me CT has recorded almost 350 known victims of traffic violence in the state. It is an epidemic that crosses lines that are both geographic and generational: victims range from just one-year-old—Camila Elizabeth Ramirez-Carcamo, killed in a hit-and-run in Hartford in early June—to elders struck on their afternoon walk around the neighborhood. In 2024, that included 10 people in New Haven alone. While the city’s rate is slowly declining, said Mayor Justin Elicker, even one death is far too many.
Sunday, several speakers lent a human face to those statistics, urging those there to remember each individual victim, and transform their grief and anger into action. Holding a portrait of New Havener Yusuf Gürsey, Hamdenite and fellow peace activist Mary Compton mourned the loss of her friend, a scholar and fierce advocate for peace who often decried the very lack of pedestrian infrastructure that ultimately killed him. For decades, Gürsey was one of the people who would naturally, instinctively show up—despite the fact that it took one or more buses and pounding the pavement to do so. His feet were his primary mode of transportation.
“We could count on him being there, no matter the weather,” she remembered. As a member of the Greater New Haven Peace Council, Compton came to know him as a fixture in the movement. Over the years, the two became close, there during chilly fall and winter marches and hot summer mornings remembering the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the New Haven Green. “He took a stand on the side of justice, and remained faithful to the cause.”
In April of this year, Gürsey was walking home from a march for Palestinian lives when he was struck and killed by a driver around Whalley Avenue and Brownell Street, just beyond the intersection with Ella T. Grasso Boulevard. Despite frequent pedestrian and bus use and two clearly marked crosswalks, the intersection does not have lighted pedestrian signals. Drivers rarely slow down as they approach it.
“What hurts is that he was so aware” of the gaps in pedestrian infrastructure, said his friend John Lee after the event. Gürsey often spoke about how often people parked in front of bus stops, or how the city failed to clear snow and ice from those stops during the winter. Living off of Whalley, he saw the danger that cars put people in every day. He spoke passionately of the change that the city needed to make to be a safer place for everyone.
“I remember him as being deeply principled,” Lee added. “There was never a doubt that he would show up.”
Fellow speakers stressed that traffic violence can happen anywhere, at any time, to anyone if drivers fail to practice safety behind the wheel. Speaking with an occasional catch in her throat, Farmington resident Carri Roux remembered the night that her son, 17-year-old Luke Roux, was hit and killed by a drunk driver on his way home from a baseball game in 2022. In a different universe, he would have started his junior year at the University of Connecticut this fall.
“These moments are etched in my mind,” Roux said, recalling step by step the night her youngest son was killed. In the grass, several friends and family members hugged framed portraits of Luke in his burgundy graduation gown, a red-and-white tassel dangling beside his right cheek.
That summer evening, Luke—a newly minted high school grad—had played a baseball game at a field nearby, just 10 or so minutes from the family’s home. The mood was festive: it was one of his best games, she recalled. When it was over, Carri headed back to the house to walk the dog. She expected her son to be back by the time she returned. When he wasn’t, she checked her phone for his location.
What she saw made her pause, and then pause gave way to worry. Luke’s phone showed him at an intersection close to the family’s home—but the dot wasn’t moving, as it would if he were driving. It remained stationary long after a light would have changed. It was then that “a pit began to form in my stomach,” she recalled.
When she headed to the intersection, her growing fears were confirmed. Flashing lights and emergency medical personnel filled the street. She remembered the EMTs, the white fabric of her son’s baseball uniform. She later learned that a drunk driver had left a rowdy tailgate at a music venue in Hartford, gotten in his car, and sped more than 40 miles over the speed limit.
When he blew through a stoplight, killing her son, it had already been red for 18 seconds.
Even before the hospital, the doctors, “the news that my heart already knew,” Carri knew that her youngest child was gone. She knew that her family could never be the same. She also knew that Luke’s death was entirely preventable.
“Our culture needs to change,” she said, advocating for changes from better business practices to legislative policy. Had there been a better system of checks in place that night—like someone to administer a breathalyzer test at the venue, or take away the driver’s keys, or order a rideshare to take him home—her son would likely still be alive.
Instead, “my family was left broken,” she said. While it’s her son’s memory that pushes her to fight, the pain of it is also immense and profound. When people ask how many children she has, she said—a seemingly innocuous question—she’s had to craft an answer that doesn’t require a long explanation. “My husband and I were blessed with three sons,” she tells people. Every time, it’s still a wound.
That trauma is an ecosystem, added Sgt. Charles Grasso, a retired first responder who worked decades in emergency services, and now works as a crash data liaison at the Connecticut Transportation Institute. Not only are families, friend groups and communities gutted by unexpected loss—the medics, police and officials who respond to these events also experience PTSD, anxiety, substance use disorder and strain on their day-to-day relationships because of what they see in the line of duty.
“A lot of us are told to ‘Suck it up,’” he remembered, chronicling his own journey in law enforcement. When Grasso was 16, he watched a friend lose his life after his car collided with a pole. In the hundreds of fatal and near-fatal crashes he’s responded to since that day, there isn’t a victim that he forgets about, or a story he doesn’t learn. Before he retired, he said, he used to lay in bed and think about the people who had died in crashes that were preventable.
To those testimonies, a coalition of safe streets advocates also included a list of demands, from more pedestrian crossings on Whalley Avenue to harsher penalties on drivers who are caught speeding, a problem that has plagued New Haven for years, and appears to be getting worse despite 19 red light cameras coming to the city.
Those include safer crossings on Route 10, a state-owned section of Ella T. Grasso Boulevard, more ADA-friendly infrastructure, and the full implementation of something called Leading Pedestrian Intervals or LPIs, which give pedestrians a seconds-long head start before a signal changes. According to the National Association of City Transportation Officials or NATCO, LIPs can reduce pedestrian-vehicle collisions as much as 60 percent.
Mayor Justin Elicker, himself a frequent cyclist who began his career in New Haven politics as a safe streets advocate, said that New Haven is working to make the city safer for all New Haveners, including those who walk, bike, and take public transit as their primary mode of moving through the city.
He noted not just the plan to implement 19 traffic cameras, but also New Haven’s recent influx of $11 million in federal dollars to improve a 1.6-mile stretch of Chapel Street, and the “Safe Routes for All” plan that alders approved two years ago this fall. He also noted the addition of traffic calming measures across the city, including the beloved “Peanut” roundabout in Westville and multiple speed bumps, speed humps and bike lanes across the city.
Emcee Amy Watkins, assistant manager of Connecticut Children's Injury Prevention Center and the director of Safe Kids Connecticut, added a recognition of the late Alder Tom Ficklin’s work around traffic safety, including advocacy for two blocks of sidewalk that run along Crescent Street in the city’s Beaver Hills neighborhood.
Rarely, however, did legislators gathered onstage suggest how, from a policy perspective, they would work to better regulate and curb speeding, drunk driving, and distracted driving, which remain the number one cause of traffic violence in Connecticut and in the United States. Instead, many framed it as an issue of personal responsibility, urging attendees to talk to their friends and loved ones about the importance of focusing on the road and driving sober.
“It’s talking to our loved, ones our spouses, our neighbors, our friends,” said State Rep. Roland Lemar, who also noted the strides he has been able to make at the Connecticut General Assembly in Hartford. “I promise you that text is not as important as that five year old crossing the street.”
Joyner: “Bikes can be replaced, but not humans."
“This has moved from a conversation to a movement,,” said Majority Leader and Amity/Westville Alder Richard Furlow, noting the growth of pedestrian safety zones as a step in the right direction. “Life is a right in our country, and we choose to live safely.”
In conversations across the park afterwards, some advocates expressed frustration that there is not already more safe streets infrastructure in place. David Joyner, for whom cycling is a primary mode of transportation, remembered jumping off his bike in 2020, after a car ran a red light and drove so close to him that part of his bike got caught in the front bumper.
Joyner jumped off. The bike was crushed in seconds. “Bikes can be replaced, but not humans,” he said. When he bikes, he knows which intersections will feel most dangerous before he even leaves the house (Martin Luther King Boulevard and the Boston Post Road are two of his least favorites). Even with bike lights and protective gear, “I pray everyday,” he said.
Waleed Ahmad, who lives in Westville, said that he thinks constantly about how “barbaric” cars are—and how they could be rendered obsolete in a city with better functioning public transit and infrastructure for walkers and bikes. As a cyclist and a dad, Waleed is constantly worried about the safety of his young daughter, a 20-month-old who does not yet have a sense of fear around cars and traffic.
“I think we don’t think about this enough,” he said, pointing to how large cars have gotten, and how fast many of them go. “It’s just a terrible reality that we are living in. Senator [Richard] Blumenthal mentioned that cars are safer. They’re safer for the people inside.”