A vigil and march in memory of the 35-year-old prosecutor, who worked in the Brooklyn D.A.’s office and died after she was struck by a bus in Williamsburg on September 7th, will take place Friday at Fort Greene Park at 6:30 p.m.
Sarah Pitts was hit by an Excellent Bus Service charter bus on Wythe Avenue at the intersection of Williamsburg Street early Monday morning, and the advocacy group Riders 4 Rights is organizing the memorial happening tonight which will end at McCarren park.
Pitts’ work with the Post-Conviction Justice Bureau in Brooklyn brought praise from Brooklyn D.A. Eric Gonzalez who called her a “kind and generous co-worker who will be greatly missed.”
Pitts’ friends and fellow bike advocates continue to draw attention to the perilous conditions on NYC streets where they say traffic enforcement can be lax, including the intersection where Pitts was killed, Streetsblog reports:
“Just hours after Pitts’s bike lay mangled on the side of the road — with her water bottle and Black Lives Matter sign still fastened to its frame — police stationed at the corner on Tuesday afternoon refused to ticket the school buses blocking the Wythe Avenue bike lane. Friends say Pitts was heading home to Clinton Hill from a meeting with Riders For Rights, a group of cyclists fighting to protect protesters’ first-amendment rights, on the night she was killed.
Cops at the scene on Tuesday told Streetsblog they were there for a “Vision Zero thing,” but they were more focused on enforcement in the intersection and moving violations than on ticketing idling trucks and buses blocking the unprotected bike lane; they said that the school buses would leave soon, anyway, once the private yeshivas nearby let out for the day.“
I am at the corner of Wythe and Williamsburg Street East, where 35-year-old Sarah Pitts was killed by the driver of a charter bus yesterday pic.twitter.com/f5kIyJ4x9O
— Julianne Cuba (@Julcuba) September 8, 2020
Early Thursday morning, a 29-year-old man was killed after being struck by a Camaro while biking on Avenue N near Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn, becoming the fourth bicyclist killed in September so far. With three months remaining, there have been 16 cyclist deaths in NYC this year compared with 29 cyclist deaths in all of 2019.
