We tracked Sacramento traffic deaths in 2024. Here’s how many lives were lost on city roads
In the eight years since Sacramento’s City Council made a “Vision Zero” pledge to end traffic fatalities by 2027, more than 300 people have died on city streets.
Traffic deaths are often conveyed through such numbers.
We dash off an imprecise total (“more than 300 people have died”), note the death rate per 100,000 residents (in the first 11 months of 2024, it’s just over six deaths per 100,000) or throw in an annual average (data from UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System as well as data from the coroner show that the Sacramento Police Department has investigated, on average, 36 fatal crashes per year since Vision Zero).
Deaths spiked after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic; they are down this year (32 have been killed so far), but still worse than the annual average over the four years leading up to Vision Zero (28).
A number can tell you the scale of a problem. But a number can also obscure the people it represents.
In an effort to show the staggering grief behind these numbers, The Sacramento Bee set out to document every single traffic death on city streets this year. The intention was to memorialize the people our city lost and to illuminate the systemic problems that led to their deaths.
Fatal crashes are almost always preventable through changes to infrastructure and public policy. Unlike some of the problems that plague Sacramento, the crisis of dangerous roads is neither mysterious nor complex: Staff in the Department of Public Works already know how to fix it.
As we continued to report the deaths, the City Council in September started the process of declaring a state of emergency over a road safety crisis.
How safety is funded
Even though the City Council set the ambitious goal, it has not meaningfully changed the way road safety projects are funded. After a deadly crash on a dangerous street, fixing the problem can take years — sometimes decades. That’s largely because the Department of Public Works has a very limited budget. No established mechanism to implement quick, relatively low-cost solutions to Sacramento streets currently exists.
Gabby Miller, a spokesperson for the Department of Public Works, said that staff were, as always, actively pursuing grant funding for projects. “Since adopting our (August 2018) Vision Zero Action plan,” she wrote, “the City has been diligently working to address the corridors with the highest number of fatalities and severe injuries, prioritizing identified issues and solutions.”
In May, members of the City Council ultimately decided not to send an additional $10.7 million to fund “active transportation” projects, pointing to the $77 million deficit. The city did not have the money, it said.
But Sacramento is already paying for its dangerous roads — in dollars and in grief.
In 2024, we wanted to create a record of the people who were lost.
None of the dead were significant by typical news standards. They were ordinary people.
They were our neighbors.
Who died on city streets in 2024?
The first person to die this year was Mattie Nicholson, a 56-year-old mother of six who was riding her bike on Freeport Boulevard. Her youngest daughter, Tamar Blackman, said there were “so many conversations I wish we could’ve had.”
The second person, Johanna Kate Johnston, was fatally struck while riding her bike to work — she was an attorney at the California Department of Social Services. Teresa Zepeda, Johnston’s wife, said that when they had their son, now a teenager, “It was truly the best thing that ever happened to us.”
Through Dec. 1, 30 more people had died on city streets this year: Jeffrey Blain, 59; Aaron Ward, 40; Michael J. Kennedy, 40; Federico Zacarias Cambrano, 28; Marvin Moran, 22; Sam Dent, 41; Daniel Morris, 38; Terry Lane, 55; David Rink, 51; James Lind, 54; Tyler Vandehei, 32; Jose Valladolid Ramirez, 36; Larry Winters, 76; Sau Voong, 84; Johnnie A. Fite, 82; Robert Kohler Jr., 50; Edward J. Lopez, 61; David D. Taylor, 60; José Luis Silva, 55; Geohaira “Geo” Sosa, 32; Kaylee Xiong, 18; Muhammad Saddique, 64; Azure Amonti Daniels, 48; Duane Ashby, 35; Martin Chavez, 41; Daniel Lee Jennings Jr., 54; Jordan Nicolas Rodriguez, 38; Alfred Ramirez, 23; Nelson Lee, 64; and Lindie Kraushar, 53.
Patterns emerged even in the course of the year.
Sacramento has previously identified the most dangerous streets: 14% of the city’s roadways where 79% of severe crashes occur. Almost all the fatal crashes — 24 out of 32 — happened directly on that 14% of roadways, dubbed the high-injury network.
Five more crashes happened just outside the areas of dangerous roads that are officially part of the high-injury network.
The crash that killed Valladolid was well outside the high-injury network, on Fruitridge Road and 88th Street. However, even this collision followed a pattern: A long stretch of Fruitridge is part of the network, and Valladolid, a cyclist, was the third person to die on the road this year. Rink and Lind, both pedestrians, were fatally struck on other parts of Fruitridge.
Valladolid had married his childhood sweetheart, Mayra Miranda, who is now caring for their two children alone; when their youngest, Amayrani, graduated from eighth grade in June, her dad was not in the audience. Miranda said, “I just want that road to get fixed.”
Two deaths, one crossroads — is change coming?
Only two deadly crashes were nowhere close to the designated high-injury network, but both occurred at the same Natomas Park intersection.
Sau Voong, a stylish former farmer who moved to Sacramento with his wife and eight children and, in his retirement, was helping to care for his many, many grandchildren, was killed on June 11 while riding his bike through the intersection of Club Center and Banfield drives.
Three and a half months later, Muhammad Saddique walked out of the home where he lived with his wife, two of his sons and their families. Muhammad was fatally struck at the crossroads where Voong was killed. His oldest child, Waqas, said that after raising three sons, his father had been delighted to help raise his two young granddaughters. After his father died, the city re-striped the intersection.
“They should have acted when the first incident happened,” Waqas said. “I don’t know why the city didn’t act.”
A disproportionate number of the people who were killed in traffic collisions this year were homeless — and thus more exposed to Sacramento’s dangerous roads. The Sacramento County Coroner’s Office said that Blain, Kennedy, Dent, Lane, Lind, Vandehei, Taylor and Kraushar were homeless. Taylor and Kennedy were in cars, and the rest were pedestrians or cyclists. Dent was a father of two teenage sons who, as a younger man, used to trounce his brother Johnny playing pool.
The Sacramento City Council is moving closer to declaring the state of emergency over pedestrian and cyclist safety with possible action in the new year. Whether the council’s members will seek to change the funding strategy for road improvement projects in the coming fiscal year is unclear. Councilmember Caity Maple, who submitted the state of emergency proposal, has said she hoped the declaration would affect the council’s budget-setting decisions.
Some significant improvement projects are finished or underway, including the network of parking-protected bike lanes in the city center and the safety improvements on part of the Broadway corridor.
Fixing enough of Sacramento’s streets to curb fatal crashes will come with a cost, and the city has delayed paying it.
In the meantime, a crushing toll is borne by the families of the dead.
This story was originally published December 27, 2024 at 5:00 AM.
