What the Media is Getting Wrong About the Gaudreau Brothers’ Deaths

The killing of professional hockey players, cyclists, and brothers Johnny and Matty Gaudreau by an apparently drunk SUV driver has sparked a national conversation about who is to blame for the crash.

The Gaudreau brothers were cycling along a two-lane road with no shoulder in Salem County, N.J. on Thursday after 8 p.m., when the driver of a Jeep Grand Cherokee SUV reportedly attempted an illegal right-side pass around two other motorists, who had entered the opposite lane to give the bikers more space. Driver Sean Higgins, 43, collided with the riders, killing them both. He later told police he had drunk "five or six beers" prior to getting behind the wheel.

The brothers had been in town for their sister's wedding, which was canceled in light of the tragedy.

For some street safety advocates, that staggering loss was compounded by a parade of media coverage that failed to connect the Gaudreau brothers' deaths to the larger epidemic of traffic violence on U.S. roads — or how policymakers could take action to end it.

"It is devastating to lose one child; I cannot imagine the family gathering for a joyous event [and have this happen]," said Amy Cohen co-founder of Families for Safe Streets. "It’s just incomprehensible. ... [However], the coverage so far has not accurately reflected the scale or the causes of this tragedy. It's really focusing on this one driver's bad choice, instead of our society's failure to put in place proven solutions that prevent this from happening in the first place."

Cohen stresses that despite the astonished headlines, the kind of crash that killed the Gaudreau brothers has become all too common on U.S. roads. Nearly 41,000 people were killed in car crash deaths last year alone, a rate which ranks America among the most dangerous of all developed nations for per-capita roadway fatalities.

In New Jersey, one-third of those killed were walking, biking, or otherwise traveling outside of a car when they were struck.

Advocates say those crashes, in particular, tend to share a few disturbingly predictable characteristics. Much like the Gaudreaus, most cyclists are killed on roads with no protected bikeways and high speed limits that virtually guarantee any collision will be lethal; when cyclists are killed after dark, as the brother were, those roads often don't have adequate streetlights, much like the road on which they died.

Many crashes involve increasingly large SUVs like the Jeep Grand Cherokee, which countless studies show are statistically more likely to kill people on two wheels. Almost none of those cars comes equipped with the kind of impaired driving prevention technology that could passively detect and stop a drunk driver from even starting his car, despite a congressional mandate to soon require them on all new vehicles.

And while the person behind the wheel certainly should be held accountable, many advocates argue those who have stalled on implementing life-saving policy changes should be held accountable, too.

“It is never just about the singular perpetrator," added Thomas DeVito, Families for Safe Streets's national director. "There are big systemic problems in the way that we organize our streets, in the ways that we invest in infrastructure. And it leads to very predictable outcomes; [it puts us] at the bottom of the barrel when it comes to street safety.” 

DeVito doesn't accept that the Gaudreaus' deaths were unavoidable simply because they occurred in a car-dominated rural area, and that there actually is plenty of room for bikeways on skinny country roads if you narrow down lanes or build trails parallel to the main roadway.

The challenge, though, is finding the money to do it — especially in small communities that often struggle to put up the local matching dollars necessary to receive key federal grants.

That's why DeVito is calling on Congress to pass the Sarah Debbink Langenkamp act, which was named for another cyclist, parent, and celebrated U.S. diplomat who lost her life on a road with no protected bike lane. That bill would allow communities to fund 100 percent of a bike or walk project with federal dollars, while simultaneously making it easier for local communities to apply for those directly.

“If you take a look at the street where the where the crash happened, this is a stereotypical kind of street that is designed for the quick movement of vehicles, with very little accommodation for people walking, or people biking," he added. "It's a core, foundational policy reality: people will use [streets] in the way that you design them. [The Sarah Debbink Langenkamp Act] is a technical fix to make sure communities like the one where these young men were killed can access the funds to fix their [dangerous roads].” 

At the state level, Families for Safe Streets is also urging legislators to pass the Target Zero Commission Bill, which would require the state to create a new commission aimed at getting key government officials together in one room to "develop a comprehensive and coordinated action plan to help achieve the goal of eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries on all public roadways in the State by 2040."  

If New Jersey can take action and commit to ending road deaths with systemic interventions, he hopes the rest of America can follow suit.

“We actually don't need 12-foot-wide lanes on all of our highways," added DeVito. "We don't need to constantly be expanding and adding lanes onto highways, in the way that we seem addicted to doing. We need to be focusing these wider systems-level failures — because that's ultimately what’s going to get us to where we should be in the [road safety] rankings.”

In the short term, the crash has sparked a national outpouring, particularly among hockey fans who had followed the 11 seasons that Johnny, 31, played in the National Hockey League, as well as the long career that Matty, 29, enjoyed on the ice in the independent leagues. Johnny is survived by his wife and two children under two years old; a fundraiser for Matty's wife, who is expecting the couple's first child in December, quickly outpaced its $30,000 goal by more than half a million dollars.