He Was Hit by a Driver and Left for Dead. His Shattered Bike Helped Solve the Crime.
Back when I was an editor at Bicycling magazine, in the 2010s, I covered the walls of my office with bike jerseys: one each from the many teams I’d raced for, a bunch from different events, and a few collectible ones from bygone races that I’d been gifted or I had thrifted.
At the time, I thought my stab at decorating was an effort to distinguish my featureless office from my colleagues’ featureless offices. One coworker quipped that my space was “laundry themed.”
More than just an attempt to personalize my space, I wanted to keep the memories attached to those jerseys close. I wanted to be able to look up from editing a review of a new road bike, and allow my gaze to fall on my Brooklyn Velo Force kit from 2005. I’d remember the thick, sticky salt breeze rolling off Jamaica Bay and how it felt on a Tuesday evening after the training race at Floyd Bennett Field. Then I could imagine what it would feel like to take that bike on the cannonball run home through the stream of traffic on Flatbush Avenue, with that air cutting through the fabric.
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At some point, I moved to an office in a different part of the building and re-hung my jerseys. Then I moved again and decided not to bother with the jerseys. Work had changed and I didn’t have as much time for daydreams.
My current office, at my home in Colorado, lets me keep memories close in a slightly more conventional way: A bookcase sits next to my desk and holds photos from family vacations and good times with friends, and there are framed posters on the walls. I’ve got some bikes around, too, sitting behind me on my many video calls. They help me dip out of work like those jerseys used to.
Also in my office, in the closet, are two halves of a once-sleek carbon frame that triggers a different kind of memory: an overcast day in July 2019 when I rode that bike to the Boulder Valley Velodrome, did some intervals on the track, headed home in a light drizzle, and was nearly murdered.
I only vaguely remember the early days in the ICU as I was emerging from a weeklong coma. At some point, between surgeries, hallucinations, and nightmares, my loved ones explained the basics of what had happened: I’d survived a hit-and-run. It had been really bad.
They waited until I was a little more coherent to tell me I’d nearly died on the side of the road.
At that point, I had the dimmest memory of a dream where I was on the ground and needed help. In the dream, I was unable to find my phone or even to lift my head off the ground, so I tried to use my arms to raise myself up as a car was passing. That was where the dream ended. From my family, I learned this was not a dream at all, but a memory of my fight to live. Despite 35 broken bones, pints of lost blood, two collapsed lungs, and my barely conscious state, I’d hoisted myself up enough for a passing driver to catch a fleeting glimpse of my face, stop, and call 911.
Finally, my family told me that my left leg was paralyzed and probably always would be.
I’d hear parts of the story and try to slip away again because thinking about the reality was worse than the recurring, drug-induced nightmares.
One of the few things that I recall with near perfect clarity from those early days: my brother, Eric, telling me my bike had been destroyed; broken into pieces. I remember feeling pretty sure I knew which bike I’d been riding, but I had a few, and feared I was about to learn that my prized black Specialized Venge had met a horrible end. So I asked, at first with urgent, soundless shouts enforced by my tracheotomy, and then with near-illegible scrawl—a pad in his hand, pen in mine: “what bike? WHAT BIKE??”
Eric had dropped everything to fly to my side when my then-fiancée, Gloria, had called to tell him about the crash. He is not a cyclist, not attuned to all the brands and models in which I’ve cultivated a fluency over nearly my whole life. Plus, he’d been busy helping to coordinate my complex care, tracking down my assailant, hiring a lawyer, and taking care of our grief-stricken father. He was barely feeding himself. He was not worried about the logo on the jumble of snapped carbon tubes, bent wheels, and dangling cables that had once been a Canyon Aeroad.
So he said, “Uh, I don’t know. It was red.”
As I was later told, I waved my hand dismissively at this news. The red Canyon was new to me and I’d been having a bad season, even before getting run over. I’d been getting dropped at races and was feeling shitty about my fitness. And while I’d tried to make the bike my own—upgrading the stock wheels, saddle, and bar tape to suit my somewhat particular preferences—I didn’t yet love the Canyon as I loved bikes from fitter, faster seasons.
As the days, weeks, and months ground on, I was buoyed by an outpouring of love from friends and family. I began to improve, and my story became one of stubborn perseverance and hard-won physical gains—all celebrated in triumphant Instagram posts.
Meanwhile, the story of the red Canyon was one of bureaucratic morass: In the chaotic aftermath of the crash, the Colorado State Patrol handed the Canyon over to Gloria. She loaded the broken bike into her truck, drove to meet me at the hospital, then promptly forgot about it when she learned the extent of my injuries. The police called the next day and asked for the bike back, having realized it was evidence of a crime.
The red Canyon stayed with the police for a long time. Paint that had “transferred” onto the bike turned out to be evidence critical to identifying the vehicle that hit me—a white Dodge cargo van. Occasionally, I’d hear an update about the case from the district attorney and I’d have a passing thought about the bike, but I wasn’t too worried about adding a broken frame to the pile of recovery-related junk that was crowding the home Gloria and I shared—wheelchairs, a shower bench, boxes of catheters, mounds of physical therapy equipment. Besides, I wasn’t riding any kind of bike at that point.
Two years went by. Eventually, there was an arrest and a prosecution, a plea deal, and a two-year jail sentence for my assailant—a warranted punishment, and one made possible mostly because the driver had fled, but also one that failed to help my recovery, or even to justly address the nature of the crime.
Meanwhile, I’d started riding again. After struggling to power myself up even tiny rises on the bike path with my one strong leg having to overcome the paralyzed one, I bought an e-gravel bike. It was perfect for exploring the dirt roads above Boulder while staying away from cars. The motor gave me enough power to keep up with other riders and reclaim my place in the peloton. Before the crash, I would never have considered relying on an e-bike to hang with a group. Now I saw the technology as an incredible gift.
Ever the gear nerd, I started thinking I’d be grateful to have the HED wheels off the Canyon as a spare set for my new bike—one set of wheels with 35mm tires for normal gravel, and another set with 49mm tires for getting rowdy in the limited way a person who can’t stand on the pedals can get rowdy. If nothing else, it was nice to think about bike equipment that could help me have more fun, instead of searching for a knee brace that wouldn’t wear holes in my skin while hiking, another reminder of the adaptations I now required to enjoy the outdoors.
The driver was halfway through his incarceration by the time I prevailed upon the police to return the bike. On a cool April morning nearly three years after the crash, I met a technician from the state crime lab. She dragged a bike box out of a truck and slid it across the pavement to me.
Most of the pieces of the Canyon were inside, and a pile of carbon splinters littered the bottom of the box. Everything was smashed; it was immediately clear that the wheels were not usable. I don’t know why I’d thought they’d be OK. Even the King Cage bottle cages that I’d prized for their grip and durability—and selected despite being an incongruous aesthetic choice for a sleek aero bike—were mangled beyond hope.
I took some pictures of the bike when I got home, captivated by the amount of destruction that met my eyes. Nearly every tube had been damaged in the crash. When I lifted the bike out of the box, the rear triangle dangled awkwardly below the front, twisting slowly on the intact shift cable and rear brake hose.
I’d been thinking about the bike in only the most practical terms—I wanted another set of wheels. I hadn’t stopped to consider that it was also a very physical manifestation of the trauma it and I had endured together. Looking at that bike made the “hit” part of the hit-and-run so much more real—how much force was required to inflict this much damage? Had the driver accelerated into me to cause even more? Had the bike gone under the van’s wheels?
I don’t remember the crash at all and have only the foggiest memory from the moments following. I don’t recall if I was in pain, if I looked at my extremely broken leg or my extremely broken bike. I can vaguely summon the moment I realized that I was beyond helping myself, and that I couldn’t find my phone. The last-ditch plan I came up with before fading into an oh-so-tempting slumber—to wave at a car in hopes that someone would stop and help me—still sometimes seems like it was a dream.
By the April morning when I got my bike back, I’d made a lot of progress. I could walk without a cane, climb mountains, enter the paracycling category in some gravel races on my e-bike, and ride my track bike slowly around the velodrome in Colorado Springs. I may have dozens of metal pieces holding my bones together, but I didn’t have to see them every day; even my many scars had largely faded. But no one had hammered, screwed, or pinned the Canyon back together. So there it was, nearly three years after the crash, just as broken as it was on July 20, 2019.
Seeing the shattered Canyon that morning forced me, maybe for the first time, to think about the violence of the impact, and to fully comprehend what a Dodge cargo van does when it slams into a person and a bike. The sight made me involuntarily imagine what it must have felt like to have all that metal and glass smash into my body. For a moment, I could almost taste the rusty steel and chalky, blistered paint. It seemed shocking that I’d survived at all, shocking that my injuries, while extensive, weren’t worse. These were not new thoughts, but ones I understood with greater fidelity as I contemplated a sticker bearing my name and the New York City flag that I’d once placed on the Canyon’s top tube.
By this time, I had spent almost three years relentlessly focused on my physical recovery and regaining my independence; investing thousands of hours to reclaim parts of my life I’d nearly lost. I’d relearned to dress myself, shower, and care for my paralyzed leg; to go grocery shopping and cook without losing balance; to walk, to ride my e-bike and hike with crutches and a pocket full of catheters. The damage to my nerves meant I had to relearn and intentionally manage basic biological functions that I’d previously thought were hardwired into my very cells: controlling my bowels and bladder, and, yes, even figuring out the pharmacological cocktail that would let me fuck. That’s all completely normal for a person with paraplegia. And I’m grateful I can do those things at all, but it doesn’t change the difficult reality that just getting out of bed now requires dedicated time, careful focus, and expensive equipment and drugs over which I always have to fight insurance.
During those first years focusing on my physical recovery, I’d hardly ever stopped to examine—or even acknowledge—the emotional toll. In fact, I intentionally pushed away sadness, anger, loss, fear, and isolation. I was scared of those feelings, scared that if I indulged the trauma even a little, I’d be unable to stop it from wholly enveloping me and sending me into a depression that would keep me from the rehabilitation program that now grounded me. I was scared that if I even glanced toward the traumatic reality, I’d become inconsolable, unable to participate in my community, my work, my life.
But standing outside my garage with the dead Canyon arrayed on the pavement, I couldn’t deny the trauma. My stomach pulled into a dense ball as my chest tightened. I started thinking about the worse outcomes I’d narrowly avoided. I felt on the verge of losing control. Unwilling to experience what I was sure would come if I kept contemplating the bike, I piled the Canyon back into its box and shoved it into a dark corner of the garage.
The Canyon stayed in the garage for a long time. Someone else might have tossed it in the dumpster, but the crash felt too much a part of me to simply throw away this symbol of that moment. I often thought about what to do with it.
One friend, half-kidding, suggested turning it into a urinal and installing it at a country store we frequent for midride cookies. Someone else suggested creating a Ghost Bike—a painted-white bike installed somewhere a cyclist was killed by a driver—out of the two halves and mounting it at the crash site.
I dismissed these ideas. The bike helped me remember something important, but I wasn’t interested in forcing others to confront my trauma while they were out enjoying a ride. Certainly not every time they went to the bathroom at the Gold Hill Store.
Eventually, I came to realize that as much as seeing the broken bike threatened my equilibrium, it was also a reminder that flesh and blood and bone are more resilient than carbon. The bike reminds me of what I’ve overcome.
I keep other bikes around, bikes that help me recall excellent times: that black Specialized Venge I love so much, and a timeless, swoopy Fuji Track Elite. I’m no longer capable of making these race bikes go fast, but in the way that the Brooklyn Velo Force jersey took me back to racing at Floyd Bennett Field, these bikes remind me what it felt like to dance up a hill, or to embrace the sideways gravity unique to the banks of a velodrome. The bike I ride now, a Specialized Turbo Creo e-gravel bike, is there too, often plugged in, charging and ready to make new memories.
It’s now been five years since the crash, and as time has passed, I’ve reached a plane of acceptance. My recovery is now a permanent part of my existence. With that acceptance came clarity on what to do with the bike—I needed to learn to engage with it, and the traumatic memory it triggers, to acknowledge those feelings without letting them consume me. It took years to achieve that goal.
I’ve learned to compartmentalize the trauma so it’s less likely to overwhelm me. The tsunami that threatened to level me when I first received the bike from the police now feels more like a small breaker that hits harder than I expect but can’t knock me down. Maybe in an effort to try and ride those waves, I retrieved the red Canyon from the garage and kept it out in my office for a while. But seeing the results of the violent impact every day turned out to be too jarring. So I tucked the bike into my office closet.
Sometimes, the bike still startles me; I’ll reach for a vest or piece of camping equipment and see the jagged ends of the carbon frame. Even then, I’m able to look at the bike, know what it is, remember how it came to be that way, and acknowledge the trauma without having it crush me.
I’ll always be that person who left the velodrome to ride home in the rain on a Saturday afternoon and didn’t make it. That ride changed my life in ways that I now see as both negative and positive. I can’t foresee a future where I don’t need a bulky leg brace to walk and ride, but with my brace on, I’m pretty capable of most things. And while my health picture isn’t as clear as it once was, there have been positive changes in my life, too; a new and stronger relationship, meaningful connections to the community that came to my aid when I needed help, a more balanced life that doesn’t solely revolve around pedaling, and an incredible appreciation for the days when I do still pedal.
Sometimes I find myself wanting to think about the crash—maybe to remember that I’m actually quite lucky to need two physical therapy appointments every week, or to show myself that the persistent nerve pain I live with is some kind of a twisted blessing. In those moments, I can slide the closet open and the red Canyon is there to reveal, in stark contrast to that mangled frame, that my life is pretty good. Maybe despite the crash. Maybe even because of it.
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