On a dangerous Sacramento road, one young man lost his leg. Another lost his life

Dirk Couvson was still lying in the street — still bleeding — when he made his first phone call after the crash. He called his mother.

Lythia Bouie answered the phone at almost 11 p.m., and for a moment, she thought her wisecracking youngest boy was joking. But she heard something terrible in her son’s voice, something in the way he said “Momma.”

More than three months later, she could still barely talk about it.

Couvson, just 20 years old, said he told her that night, “My leg is gone.”

He had been riding his motorcycle to pick up food on the way home from work Jan. 7. As Couvson was making a left turn from the Business 80 offramp just east of Harvard Street onto Arden Way, someone driving a car blew through a red light and smashed into Couvson. The driver sped off. Couvson never lost consciousness, and he remembered everything, lying on the street.

His leg didn’t hurt, exactly, but it felt like it was on fire.

The police report says they found Couvson around 11 p.m. He was on the ground by the offramp. A passerby had seen a car speed away from the scene, then pulled over and called 911 when he saw Couvson. The witness told police he thought the driver was going 60 mph — maybe even faster.

The Sacramento Police Department report says investigators found 40 yards of fresh tire marks on Arden heading west through the area of impact.

The crash was preceded by a series of mundane decisions. Couvson agreed to work 2:30 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. that Sunday — not his usual shift. He rode his motorcycle — not his usual mode of transportation at night. When he got off work, he was hungry. He headed toward the In-N-Out on Alta Arden Expressway.

Now, as he struggles to make ends meet on a meager Employment Development Department Disability Insurance payment that’s less than a quarter of his previous wages, as he recovers from his injuries and frequently wakes up from nightmares gasping for breath, he keeps asking himself, “What if?”

What if he hadn’t told his boss he could work the Sunday shift that day?

What if he had never ridden a motorcycle at all?

Another “what if?” — a subtler one — hovers around Sacramento’s City Hall. Municipal workers have already identified Arden Way as part of the high-injury network: It’s one of the surface streets with the highest numbers of serious injuries and deaths in vehicle crashes. Sacramento leaders made a Vision Zero pledge seven years ago to fix the city’s dangerous streets and to end debilitating and deadly crashes.

Sacramento has made some progress, which includes recent safety-enhancing changes to dozens of blocks in the city center. But such evidence-based improvements have not yet been made to Arden Way, where the posted limit is a lethal 40 mph and traffic on the wide street routinely travels much faster.

Couvson can’t know what would have happened if the city had followed through on its promises more quickly. All he has is the reality: His left leg was amputated shortly after the crash, making him another casualty of a crisis in the city’s infrastructure.

And the casualties have piled up. UC Berkeley’s Transportation Injury Mapping System shows that between 2012 and the end of 2023, seven crashes resulted in serious injuries and three left victims dead on the mile-and-a-half stretch of Arden from Evergreen Street to the city limit.

And on Feb. 10, one month after Couvson lost his leg, the Sacramento County Coroner’s Office said Federico Zacarias Cambrano was found dead about 1,000 feet west of the very same intersection. He’d been in a two-vehicle car crash.

The Sacramento Bee is 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.

Zacarias Cambrano was 28. His family could not be reached for a comment.

When Couvson was informed of the other young man’s death, he was incredulous.

“In the same spot?” he asked. Yes — the Coroner’s Office said he was found in his car on Arden Way, 775 feet west of Harvard Street.

Couvson paused for a moment. Then he said, “Yeah, that street’s dangerous.”

A dangerous road with no money to fix it

The city formally agrees with Couvson that the street imperils the people who use it, but Department of Public Works spokeswoman Gabby Miller said there were no plans to implement any emergency changes to the road.

Sacramento does have a long-term plan to change Arden Way, but that plan has no funding. Caltrans rejected a grant application in 2023; a grant this year is still under review.

Sacramento, Miller said, “recognizes that safety of human life is our highest priority, and that traffic deaths and serious injuries are often preventable, are a public health issue and must be effectively addressed.”

Although road safety is a stated priority, Sacramento allocates no money in its general fund to address the problem, and relies largely on competitive grants.

Scrambling to recover — and to pay rent

In the months after the crash, Couvson and his family have struggled not only with the physical and emotional recovery, but also the financial fallout.

As a caregiver at the senior home, Couvson said he made $4,200 a month, but currently, he cannot work. The disability payment he receives from the state is just under $1,000 — about $600 less than his rent.

Bouie has been helping him keep up with payments for the Carmichael apartment he moved into not long before he sustained his catastrophic injuries. He wanted a place of his own where he could live with his snuggly daughter, Kaili, who turned 1 in March.

To cover the rent and copays on all his new medications, they’ve relied in part on GoFundMe donations.

“Financially,” Bouie said, “it’s a challenge.”

She knew her son could have died

The night of the crash, Bouie rushed to the hospital. When she got to UC Davis Medical Center, all she knew was that her child had said his leg was gone, and now he was in surgery. Staff did not tell her immediately how he was doing. After 25 minutes, she said, she began to think she wasn’t getting answers because the surgeons thought he might die. She started to panic.

She thinks it a surgeon came out after another 20 minutes.

“That’s when they told us, ‘He will make it, but his foot was badly damaged,’” she said. “I was like, ‘It’s crushed?’ They said they had to amputate his foot, and I was like, ‘Is there any way you can save it?’ ‘No.’ (The surgeon) came out with some pictures to show us just how bad his foot was. There wasn’t even nothing to say.”

She paused. “It was heartbreaking,” she said. “He’s only 20. Just starting to live his life.”

A life altered on a road known to be dangerous

Between the hospital and rehab, Couvson spent a month in medical facilities. For most of the time, he said, “I’m just stuck in the room. Can’t do nothing, can’t get up.” He thinks he didn’t get out of bed at all for three weeks. His family would visit, “And sometimes when they’d leave, I would just start crying.”

Couvson is a positive person. His mother described him as “outgoing and adventurous,” an active young man; he wanted to travel. He loves to hike with his friends.

Mother and son both recognize that he can still do most of what he wanted to do with his life — eventually — but the amputation presents some serious hurdles. He hopes he’ll be able to go back to being a caregiver for elderly people once he relearns how to walk with his prosthetic leg. He loves to chitchat with his clients.

“I’m thankful my son is alive,” Bouie said, sitting in her home in South Sacramento. “I can still hold him and kiss him and talk to him.”

But Couvson is a long way from recovering; he expects he won’t be walking for a year. In April, he still used a wheelchair to get around. He continued to experience severe pain, sometimes in the left leg below the knee — the leg that isn’t there. He thinks he may have post-traumatic stress disorder.

“Sometimes I just close my eyes, maybe like five seconds, to go to sleep,” he said. “And I just see a car hitting me. And I just gasp for air.”

Bouie saw her son have one of these nightmares not too long ago. She watched her son jerk awake, breathless, reaching for his leg.

To prevent serious collisions like his, Couvson believes “the city should figure something out about that street.”

“I don’t want nobody else to go through the same thing I went through,” he said, but as soon as he said it, he knew it was already too late.

Because — seven years after Sacramento promised to fix its roads and 34 days after Couvson’s leg was crushed — another crash on Arden Way killed Federico Zacarias Cambrano.