Damian Kevitt speaks in Gloria Molina Grand Park on November 17, 2024 in honor of World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims. (Photo by Matthew Royer)

Walker Musso just wanted to hang out with his younger brother one last time before he left for college.

Eighteen-year-old Musso sat behind the wheel of his Dodge Challenger, with his brother in the passenger seat, and drove south toward nearby Elk Grove. They stopped for ice cream sandwiches – “all the craze” in 2015 – and visited friends as they reminisced on their years growing up together in Sacramento. Musso, days away from starting at Menlo College on a baseball scholarship, said he felt like he "had the world in his hands."

Musso drove his 2010 Challenger, an enhanced performance road and track model, through open roads alongside farmland. The kind of driving where he said nothing can be seen for up to five miles.

"I was like, 'let’s just see what we can do in this stretch of road right here. Let's see how quickly it can accelerate,'" Musso said. The last thing he saw as his speedometer hit 100-plus mph was the blinding glare of an oncoming car’s headlights.

Musso said he wishes the night had ended minutes earlier. He wishes the thought to accelerate had never crossed his mind.

Then, he wouldn't have spent more than a year in prison. His brother wouldn't have ended up bedridden in a hospital. His Challenger wouldn't have ripped through a small pickup truck at 130 mph.

He wouldn't have killed a recently married couple on impact.

"I have to keep living with these two people's souls on my conscience for the rest of my life," said Musso, now 28.

A decade since the incident, Musso mended relationships with his family, found a job in real estate and is finishing his court-mandated community service after being released from prison. However, this doesn't mark the end of his journey.

"I don't get to pretend like this is over. I don't get to forget," Musso said. "Hopefully, [I can] prevent others from making the same choices I did."

Musso is one of the many activists attempting to change the dialogue around traffic violence in California, shifting from the language of "accidents" toward the reality of "violence." The coalition includes victims like Damian Kevitt, a biker who made road safety his mission after becoming an amputee in a hit-and-run crash, and Lili Trujillo, a mother whose daughter was killed in a street racing collision 10 years ago. They are devoted to ending what they call a "public health crisis."

In Los Angeles, where Kevitt and Trujillo are based, vehicular deaths outnumbered homicides last year. Musso works for Street Racing Kills, an organization that Trujillo started in 2014. Since 2015, when then-Mayor Eric Garcetti launched the city's Vision Zero program – a commitment to eliminate traffic deaths by 2025 – fatalities climbed from 186 to 345 in 2023.

This isn't a normal trend compared to other American cities or European countries that have started Vision Zero programs, Kevitt added. New York and Chicago, cities comparable to Los Angeles, have seen dramatic decreases in traffic deaths, while in Europe, Helsinki and Oslo reached their goal of hitting zero.

The lack of measurable progress toward safer streets in Los Angeles is a frustrating trend, said Kevitt, executive director of the advocacy group SAFE, or Streets Are For Everyone. In 2013, Kevitt was bicycling in Griffith Park when he was hit and pinned underneath a car. For nearly a quarter of a mile, the car dragged his body from the streets onto Interstate 5 at highway speeds. The vehicle ripped off Kevitt's right leg – tearing 20 pounds of flesh from his body in less than two minutes.

Kevitt was left stranded on the freeway, and the hit-and-run driver was never caught. He considers himself lucky to survive. He said there isn't a "single solution" he can pinpoint to fix the city's streets or to prevent deadly driving. But Kevitt insists it's possible to prevent fatalities.

The coalition is leading the effort to push city, county and state governments to prioritize their concerns and perspectives of those affected by traffic violence.

"For every one of us, there's another 1,000 or 2,000 of them out there that are by themselves – and that's just in the last year," Kevitt said. "These are family members who have been impacted, who’ve lost loved ones and they don’t have that support."

"As far as they know, we're their support, but we're doing that at a grassroots level. We’re here. This is grassroots."

Kevitt said he struggles most with complacent politicians and community members who see rising numbers as the status quo. While Kevitt and the coalition of victims, families and road safety organizations successfully pushed for legislation to create a pilot program to install speed cameras at dangerous intersections across major cities, like San Francisco, in the state, Los Angeles has yet to install the technology.

New technology and political lobbying can only go so far, Kevitt acknowledges, but he says activist efforts must be made through pleas for personal action. Trujillo believes that this is where her perspective comes into play.

Taking Action

Trujillo's 16-year-old daughter, Valentina, was heading home from a high school party in 2013 in the early hours of the morning when the driver of the vehicle she was in decided to race another car. The split-second decision proved fatal, as the car crashed into a woman commuting to work.

Only Valentina died.

Trujillo not only mourns the death of her child but also the circumstances that led to her death.

"These girls, this young man, never got any education at school regarding the dangers of street racing, speeding and seat belt safety," she said. "I was blown away."

Lili Trujillo poses with a photo of her late daughter, Valentina. (Photo by Matthew Royer)

Reflecting on her daughter's passing and the preventable measures that could have been taken to save lives led Trujillo to start her organization, Street Racing Kills, in Los Angeles. Since then, she has expanded to other cities. Trujillo and others also lobbied Gov. Gavin Newsom to sign four bills cracking down on street racing and reckless driving. The bills, signed into law in September, include harsher penalties for drivers and expand law enforcement's ability to impound vehicles.

While these bills are important for upholding the law and maintaining road safety, she said, communities must do more to prevent reckless driving before someone sits behind a steering wheel.

"Why wait until something bad happens?" she asked.

This mindset led Trujillo to offer educational programs through Street Racing Kills, teaching young drivers how to avoid reckless driving and follow proper safety procedures on the road. However, the most effective programs, according to Trujillo, are those that involve perpetrators of traffic violence.

Trujillo's staff includes three formerly incarcerated perpetrators of traffic violence, including Musso. She said the perspective they bring to driving and road safety lessons for new drivers helps bridge the gap of understanding what one mistake could do to your life.

However, youth are sometimes hard to convince regarding the risks of reckless driving, said Asa Kaufman, a 16-year-old activist for safer streets.

Kaufman, who helps his father Eli run the biking advocacy group Bike LA, said the freedom associated with getting a driver's license and a first car often outweighs the risks. This mindset is dangerous, he said, as small distances can be most dangerous.

"It's irresponsible," Kaufman said. "When people are driving short distances, they tend to be more comfortable, and they’ll go faster, and be less careful because they're like, 'Oh, this is my neighborhood.'"

Kaufman fears reckless drivers, especially as a bicyclist, and is scared of potential injuries like Kevitt's. ​​Nine cyclists have died in hit-and-runs in Los Angeles this year, matching the recent annual high for bicycle hit-and-run deaths of 2019 and 2023.

Kevitt said the poor design of some Los Angeles roads leads to higher cases of speeding, which go unenforced by the Los Angeles Police Department’s traffic divisions. The duality of weak infrastructure and lack of law enforcement is one factor showing how the city and Vision Zero have "failed" their mission up to this point, Kevitt said.

Traffic Violence in Los Angeles

In August 2015, Garcetti – preparing for his mayoral reelection campaign – stood in the middle of Boyle Heights and launched a bold initiative: In 10 years, he proclaimed, the city would have zero deaths with traffic violence as the cause.

"With more people walking and biking than ever before, we must use every available tool to save lives," Garcetti said in 2015. "I am determined to bring that number down to zero."

He acknowledged the goal would be hard to meet. It would take a lot of work to unify the LAPD and other city departments under one mission. The bureaucratic forces of the county's public health department, the Los Angeles Unified School District and LA Metro, along with the city’s private, non-profit and activist stakeholders, would need to step up too.

Garcetti also set a pilot goal to test his vision’s might: By 2017, the city’s traffic deaths would drop by 20%.

Two years later, deaths had risen by nearly 30%, with no slowdown in sight.

Garcetti appointed Ashley Z. Hand to help oversee Vision Zero’s transportation and technology program. Hand, who no longer works for the city of Los Angeles, said the efforts behind the initiative started well enough. An email Garcetti sent in 2015 to the city announcing her appointment as transportation technology strategist fellow singled her out as someone who would help "steer us away from being the world’s car capital."

Los Angeles seemed ready to back a significant move toward sustainability and accessibility in its transportation efforts, she said. Hand said she was optimistic. The city’s data-driven approach to mitigating traffic violence was cutting-edge, she said, noting that the development of the "High-Injury Network" pinpointed that 70% of deaths and severe injuries for pedestrians occur on just 6% of the city’s streets.

Slowly, bureaucracy took over. Hand said reaching a consensus with dozens of departments on a policy priority proved challenging. Still, another hurdle was ensuring the speed of a systemic approach with so many voices crafting the program.

"It takes an awful lot to see the culmination of the benefits," Hand said. "But that's not [a] reason not to do it, because obviously it’s fatal."

For example, by pinpointing the roads of Los Angeles with the highest fatal collisions, a clear trend began to take shape. South LA saw the most traffic violence, with Black and Latino communities hurt the most.

"You could not talk about Vision Zero without talking about the disproportionate impacts on Black and brown communities in the city," she said. "It is 100% an equity issue."

Kevitt said that while the program has made progress on identifying issues, the lack of success in its initial goal – curbing traffic deaths – is more of an indictment on the city’s leadership. Kevitt said the cities that succeeded in their Vision Zero programs used key programs and strategies that the city and county of Los Angeles have allowed to go dormant.

When asked for an interview with city administrators overseeing Vision Zero to discuss the initiative’s progress and performance, a spokesperson for the Los Angeles Department of Transportation said in an email that they could not complete the request since the department will be "providing a report to Council on this topic soon after the new year."

The city’s budget for 2022-2023 allocated $500,000 for an outside contractor to audit Vision Zero. The contract, made available through public records, stated that the contractor would complete the audit by January 2024. The audit has since been amended by the city twice, extending the contract last Decemeber until April, and then in June to be extended until August, totaling an additional $32,470.

A spokesperson for the Office of the City Administrative Officer said in an email that the report would not be released until January 2025 and that they “would not be able to talk about” Vision Zero until then.

Hand said the complexity of adding and subtracting stakeholders makes Vision Zero here more of a dream than a reality. Since Mayor Karen Bass was elected in 2022, she has prioritized her “Inside Safe” program to tackle the homelessness crisis in the city. Still, Hand sees a possible future where both programs can receive attention and resources without hampering the end goal of either – especially as the city prepares to welcome millions of people for the 2028 Olympic Games.

"Vision Zero has the benefit of being kind of foundational, in many ways, to our economic success in cities," said Hand, who now works for the government of Kansas City, Kansas. "But at the same time, unless you have leadership pushing beyond the traditional standards and business as well, it is hard to see success."

Hand said the best way to make progress is to increase education in the communities most harmed by traffic violence. Grassroots initiatives are needed to not only mend problems that community members may not understand, but to also pressure public officials and private stakeholders into doing what’s just for Los Angeles.

Refocusing Pain For Good

Musso wishes the night had ended earlier. Now, he relives that fateful night multiple times a week. He tells his story of how one mistake can lead to a lifetime of anguish in front of dozens of students at a Street Racing Kills class. He describes to classes the vast difference between the adrenaline rush he felt when pressing the gas pedal, the two lives he took and the prison sentence that followed.

Sometimes, Musso said he remembers new details or is asked a question that challenges his perspective on the crash – like how his relationship with his brother has changed or how he has handled his mental health.

These questions do not anger him, though. He said they are a part of the training he and Trujillo are putting into place. If he can learn from himself and others while helping prevent future traffic crashes, he sees it as success.

"You know, you have to open up old wounds," he said. "But it can be a sort of healing. They're scars, and they stay forever."

Musso lifted his wrists in the air, showing the group of teens the scars that envelop his arm and hands due to the glass from his windshield that punctured his skin. Musso said the scars remind him of his mistake.

"It’s not a self-pity thing," Musso said. “It's me explaining to people that two weeks from now, they probably [will] have forgotten who I am and my story."

"Life comes at us fast."