This weekend saw five people, including four teens, lose their lives on the city's roads. One person died Saturday in Bevo Mill, and preliminary police reports suggest an unidentified reckless driver caused the four other fatalities on Sunday. That driver is still at-large.
The deaths come as traffic violence in St. Louis is at a high and the recent maiming of a 17-year-old visiting from out of town has brought new attention to the issue.
The first incident happened around 12:30 p.m. on Saturday when two cars collided at Bates and Morgan Ford roads in the Bevo Mill neighborhood. After colliding in the intersection, both cars wound up atop a chain link fence separating the intersection from St. Matthews Cemetery. The driver of a Chevy Celebrity involved in the crash was killed, and the passenger in the car was taken to the hospital. The deceased individual has not been identified.
According to police, a traffic light at the intersection that should have been facing eastbound on Bates was instead facing southbound on Morgan Ford.
Ward 13 Alderwoman Anne Schweitzer, whose ward includes Bevo Mill, wrote on Twitter: "One of the latest traffic deaths was in my neighborhood, due to an issue that was reported on Wednesday and should have been fixed immediately. There is no excuse, just preventable tragedy."
Mayor Tishaura Jones' office says that the issue was fixed by 11 a.m. the day after it was reported. An area resident told the Post-Dispatch that the signal appeared to be fixed on Friday, the day before the deadly crash.
However, between Friday and Saturday, the light became misaligned again.
About 12 hours after the fatal south city crash, four teenagers lost their lives in Midtown due to another driver's recklessness.
Around 1:30 a.m. on Sunday, a Chevy Impala driving south on Grand Avenue drove into the wrong lane to get around stopped traffic before speeding through a red light and colliding with a Chevy Tahoe carrying eight passengers. The collision sent the Tahoe over a guardrail onto Forest Park Avenue, where the vehicle landed upside down.
Four of the passengers died at the scene, according to an St. Louis Metropolitan Police incident report. All of them were in their teens. Four other teenage passengers were critically injured.
The driver of the Impala that caused the crash fled on foot and has not been identified.
Earlier Sunday evening, Mayor Tishaura Jones released a statement in response to the four teenager's deaths.
Her statement read in part: "Traffic violence at this location makes it the most unsafe intersection for pedestrians and cyclists in our entire city. Our office is reaching out to MoDOT regarding proposals to improve this area, and SLMPD continues to deploy a data-driven approach to hold dangerous drivers accountable in high-crash areas. The City is also exploring automated enforcement solutions to discourage dangerous driving."
The statement went on to say that later this week Jones will sign into law "the largest investment in road and pedestrian safety in the city’s history, calming streets and putting St. Louis on the path to its first mobility and transportation master plan."
In addition to the two fatal crashes, there were reports of other, non-fatal traffic incidents over the weekend. A driver smashed into three parked parks in the Grove. Downtown, near the intersection of North Seventh Street and Washington Avenue, two cars collided, sending one onto the sidewalk.This story has been updated with information from the Mayor's office.
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