A 12-year-old almost died on a dangerous Sacramento road. The family says the city did ‘nothing’

Reality Check is a Bee series holding officials and organizations accountable and shining a light on their decisions. Have a tip? Email realitycheck@sacbee.com.

She had been upright in the crosswalk, but suddenly she was lying in a pool of blood. Alena Wong, then 12, was riding her bike to school when a driver rammed into her on one of the many streets Sacramento has identified as dangerous: Sutterville Road.

The morning had been just like all her other mornings that year in seventh grade. She put on her black helmet and hopped on her Schwinn as always, riding north on Mead Avenue toward her 8 a.m. class at California Middle School, just beyond Land Park. When she arrived at the intersection with Sutterville, she hit the button that lit up the flashing pedestrian beacon, then proceeded to ride her bike across the street.

She can’t remember doing any of that on Oct. 22, 2019, though, because a 17-year-old obeying the 35 mph speed limit drove a Toyota Highlander into her.

The crash broke both of Alena’s legs, her jaw and several teeth. She sustained a traumatic brain injury. Her left femur snapped at such a sharp angle that the jagged bone ripped through her skin. A bystander found her phone and called her parents. Kevin, her dad, raced from the Wong family home just a few blocks away to find his daughter unconscious on the pavement.

Nearly five years later, the father’s eyes filled with tears as he described it.

An ambulance took Alena to UC Davis Medical Center, where she went into surgery. Doctors put her in a medically induced coma for days. Her parents were terrified. When she finally woke up, Alena — reeling from her injuries — couldn’t understand why she couldn’t walk. At one point, unable to speak because her broken jaw was wired shut, she tried to write messages to her parents.

The notes were gibberish.

Alena was resilient and improved quickly. Still, her recovery took months and, in some ways, continues to this day. As her traumatic brain injury healed, she had to relearn how to do basic math. She had to relearn how to walk. Because of the collision, Alena, now 16, gets overwhelmed in noisy crowds and struggles to concentrate for more than 45 minutes on multiple choice tests.

She’s had six surgeries so far, and she knows she’ll have more, because she can’t replace her broken teeth with implants until her jaw stops growing. By the time that happens, she’ll be in her early 20s, having lived through multiple infections and a decade of dental pain.

In response to the car crash that almost killed a child, the city eliminated some parking spots around the crosswalk to increase the visibility of pedestrians. It also put up new signs on the approach to the crosswalk to alert drivers.

But the interventions didn’t fundamentally slow down traffic, even though speed was the reason Alena almost died in the first place.

“The flashing lights, they work to an extent, but they don’t really work,” Alena said. The police report says the eastbound driver who hit her had the sun in his eyes, and Alena pointed out that the flashing lights are essentially the same color as the sun. Even when the lights are easily visible, she said, cars yield to pedestrians inconsistently.

“The road is really fast,” she said. “It’s just like the same sort of deal around here: that the roads are built to get cars places faster, not to keep the other people safe.”

UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows a two-car collision injured a tween passenger last year, and a 70-year-old pedestrian was severely injured just west of Mead a week before Alena’s crash in 2019. A spokeswoman for the city, Gabby Miller, said that in the years since, no pedestrians or cyclists have been hit at that intersection.

However, Sutterville Road is considered part of Sacramento’s “high-injury network” — the collection of streets that see the highest numbers of severe and fatal collisions.

And the Wongs think it’s hazardous to have cars passing at 35 mph through a crosswalk with a flashing pedestrian beacon, on a route that leads both to a middle school and to Land Park. With the encouragement of a Caltrans engineer, the family has been asking the city to apply for a state grant to install removable and relatively low-cost roundabouts to slow down traffic at intersections around Sacramento, including the one where Alena was almost killed.

Alena’s mother, Talyn, said that two other middle school students were hit by cars at Sutterville Road intersections around the time of Alena’s crash — collisions in which the children were not seriously injured because the drivers were moving slowly. In contrast, Alena was hit by a driver traveling around the speed limit: 35 mph, which is often lethal.

A study in Accident Analysis & Prevention found that when a car traveling just 32.5 mph strikes a pedestrian, the average risk of death is 25%; by the time the speed of the car reaches 40.6 mph, the risk that the pedestrian will die is 50%.

The Sacramento Bee is chronicling all traffic-related deaths on city streets in 2024 not only to show the causes of these fatalities and what can be done to prevent them, but also to memorialize the people we lost.

Sacramento is far from eliminating that risk. The Sacramento Bee has reported on 11 cyclist and pedestrian deaths so far this year. Nine of those deaths took place on streets the city has already identified as part of the high-injury network.

Three of them took place in June in a span of nine hours.

Unfulfilled promises to improve road safety

In 2017, Sacramento leaders made a “Vision Zero” pledge to eliminate all traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2027.

Cities such as Hoboken have successfully implemented their own Vision Zero plans. Mayor Ravi Bhalla, who has led the road safety charge in the New Jersey city, said his municipality focused on a mix of quick, low-cost solutions and ambitious, long-term changes to infrastructure.

The strategy worked: His city has not seen a traffic fatality in seven years.

“What we’re doing is not just making safer streets,” Bhalla said, “but, you know, possibly saving a human life.”

Unlike Hoboken, Sacramento has made some progress but remains unsafe, particularly for cyclists and pedestrians. In May, a report from Smart Growth America revealed the California capital region was the 20th most deadly metro area for pedestrians in the country.

Last month, two cyclists and a pedestrian were fatally struck by drivers on city streets within nine hours. The second person to die, Larry Winters, 76, was struck on Arden Way, part of the high-injury network.

Though the three victims were in different neighborhoods and the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office followed standard procedure and labeled all three of them “accidents,” the trio of deaths were part of a grim pattern.

After the third death in that nine-hour span — Sau Voong, 84, was fatally struck the morning of June 11 — Councilwoman Lisa Kaplan called for a 2026 ballot measure to raise money for safety improvements.

In the interim, more people will die, said Kiara Reed, the executive director of the Sacramento road safety advocacy organization Civic Thread. Reed said the city’s response to devastating crashes is uneven and can be painfully slow. The Wong family believes that the response to Alena’s collision didn’t go nearly far enough to make the roads safer.

And often, serious crashes garner no tangible response at all.

Arden Way pedestrian death follows two severe 2024 crashes

Dirk Couvson, then 20, was severely injured in a hit-and-run crash on Arden Way in January. One month later, Federico Zacarias Cambrano died in a two-car collision on the same road, about 1,000 feet away. He was 28. Winters, a pedestrian, died in June on the same road.

In all, the city has seen three severe crashes, two of them fatal, on a three-quarter-mile stretch of Arden Way in the first six months of 2024.

In May, months after Couvson had his leg amputated and Zacarias Cambrano died, the Department of Public Works spokeswoman said there were no emergency plans to make the road safer. Miller also said that though the city has applied for a Caltrans grant, a long-term plan to fix Arden Way currently has no funding.

Mayor Darrell Steinberg said at a May budget committee meeting that funding safe streets should be “a top, top priority,” but Sacramento’s City Council did not include $10 million in funding for the Active Transportation Commission’s recommendations in the 2024-2025 budget.

“They’re not willing to fund, but in numerous presentations that we made to city council, they expressed their support for our recommendations,” commissioner Ali Doerr Westbrook said from the dais at the June 20 commission meeting. “I just found it a little bit confusing that they said that they support the work, and that they want to see more people walking and biking, yet our budget still continues to not reflect that we’re going to do anything.”

That lack of follow-through is galling to Reed.

“We hear from our elected officials when these very unfortunate and preventable deaths happen about how it’s a big priority, and pedestrian safety is important,” she said. “But if it was so important to them, then why aren’t we seeing the allocated funding?”

Three deaths in nine hours

The deaths weren’t murders.

If they had been murders, Reed said, there would have been more of an outcry last month, because they came in such quick succession.

Around 10:30 p.m. on June 10, a cyclist — Jose Valladolid Ramirez, 36 — was hit by a car and killed on Fruitridge Road west of 88th Street, on the north edge of Florin Fruitridge Industrial Park. An hour later, Winters was hit by a car and killed near the entrance of the Arden Fair Mall, at Arden Way and Heritage Lane. The next morning, another cyclist — Voong, an 84-year-old great-grandfather — was hit by a car and killed in Natomas Park, at the intersection of Club Center and Banfield drives.

Both Ramirez and Winters were fatally struck on streets the city has identified as part of the high-injury network, though Ramirez was slightly outside the part of Fruitridge that is considered more deadly.

The Bee has previously reported on eight other pedestrians and cyclists who died this year after vehicle collisions on roads the city knows are dangerous: Mattie Nicholson, 56, Kate Johnston, 55, Jeffrey Blain, 59, Aaron Ward, 40, Sam Dent, 41, Terry Lane, 55, David Rink, 51, and James C. Lind, 54. Like Ramirez, Rink and Lind were fatally struck on Fruitridge Road, though both of the pedestrians were on the part of the road that is included in the high-injury network.

The Department of Public Works spokeswoman said that transportation projects are funded through the state gas tax and Measure A, and that staff “works diligently to identify and secure additional funding for priority transportation improvements and projects.” The city would need $5 billion to pay for 700 planned projects.

“Staff continue to pursue all competitive funding for the City’s highest-priority transportation projects,” Miller wrote in an email.

But Sacramento’s reliance on competitive grants can drag out the process, Reed said. For one thing, she said, planning and construction are often two separate grants.

“You have to submit an application, you have to wait to see who’s awarded, then you have to actually do the planning process,” Reed said. “None of those things are going to solve the immediate problem, which is that people are dying.”

A solution in sight, with no political backing

When Alena first regained consciousness and started talking at UC Davis Medical Center, Talyn said she asked where she was about once an hour. Retaining information, forming new memories: These were beyond her for a while. Her first memory after the crash is a hazy one of celebrating Halloween in the hospital, nine days after the she was hit. She was in the hospital for almost a month.

Determined to get back to normal, she ditched her wheelchair, her walker and her cane in just a few months. During physical therapy sessions, she said she focused on running and biking again.

“There was always something I could do to get closer to it,” she said.

She made fast progress, but her doctors strictly forbade her from cycling for six months.

Exactly six months after the crash, on April 22, 2020, Alena strapped on a new helmet, hopped on her bike and rode to California Middle School.

Due to pandemic shutdowns, she didn’t actually need to go to campus. But she wanted that feeling of freedom again.

“I like being in the open air,” she said. Alena is athletic — she now runs track and cross country for C.K. McClatchy High School. She prefers the cross country team for the same reason that she loves her bike: She can explore new places, see new things.

In the spring of 2020, she was a little afraid to get back to cycling, but she refused to let the crash dictate the rest of her life.

“I like biking,” she said. “And it wasn’t the bike that hurt me.”

Both her parents were nervous, too, but they wanted their daughter to continue to move through the world with confidence.

Talyn said she fielded judgment from other parents. Alena is not the only cyclist in the family: The younger Wong children ride bikes to school, too.

“Parents on the street,” Talyn said, widening her eyes, “they’ll be like, ‘I saw your kids. They were biking.’ I’m like, ‘Uh huh, every day.’ I still get comments about it.”

For her part, Talyn directed her criticisms toward Sacramento. At the June 20 Active Transportation Commission meeting, she said that soon after the crash, she was “hopeful that the city would fix the intersection. Unfortunately, despite my best efforts … nothing has happened to improve the safety of my daughter’s intersection. My children and I still risk our lives twice a day at that intersection trying to get to our neighborhood school.”

The family knows that something can be done to slow down cars. They want a roundabout. They aren’t sure, however, that the city will take any real action.

And beyond Alena’s intersection, they have ample nearby evidence that the city does not move with urgency.

The Wongs’ home sits just off Freeport Boulevard, around the corner from the January crash that killed Mattie Nicholson, a grandmother. They were also around the corner from the Freeport crash that killed QuiChang Zhu, 72, and seriously injured her grandson, Jian Hao Kuang, then 6, when the pair was using a crosswalk Jan. 31, 2018. The little boy was left with severe brain damage.

Sacramento adopted a plan to make some safety improvements to Freeport Boulevard over a year ago. In May, the city council allowed the Department of Public Works to proceed with a grant application to move into the design phase.

Six and a half years have passed since the boy was gravely disabled on Freeport Boulevard.

Sacramento is not even close to construction.