New York City/and Richmond, d.
24.June.2019, killed on the job by hit and run truck
Robyn Hightman was an experienced cyclist and bike messenger in
Richmond, Virginia. They were working on only their second shift as
a messenger in New York City when they were hit, run over by a truck
and killed. The truck driver left the scene claiming that he did not
know he had hit Robyn. The New York messenger and bike community
held a large memorial ride to remember Robyn and to call for justice
for her death and the many other cyclists killed as a result of
traffic violence.
This is heartbreaking. On February 9, bike
messenger, Kati “ LaRealEsa” Sauvita
was killed by a hit and run driver in Bogotá. On February 28, bike
messenger, Aurilla Lawrence, was
killed by a hit and run driver in New York City and now today bike
messenger Robyn Hightman, was killed by a hit and run driver in
New York City. Three hardworking women killed by hit and run
drivers and the year is not even half over yet. – Joe Hendry
This is not the story we wanted to share.
When we created our team’s Ambassador Program,
the goal was to get more involved in cycling at the grassroots
level, to connect with women who rode bikes for any reason at all
in their daily lives, and to have our riders share the world of
pro cycling with our ambassadors while learning more about what
women experience every day in their cycling lives.
Today we received devastating insight into a
terrible reality of cycling: our ambassador Robyn Hightman was
killed by a truck while working as a bike messenger in NYC. Robyn,
who used they/their as their pronouns, was only 20 years old.
Robyn’s application to our program was the most
passionate, in-depth one we’ve received out of hundreds of
applications. They wrote many times about the impact cycling had
on their life: “As a homeless youth deeply entrenched in the
trappings of poverty and parental abuse and neglect, my first
bicycle offered a way to seek respite from the horrors of my
surroundings and human experience, if only for a few glorious
minutes. My bicycle established a sense of independence,
strengthened my ability to be self sufficient, and provided me
with the confidence necessary to advocate for myself, my rights,
and my needs in public space. My bicycle enabled me to leave our
encampment every day to access education, seek out food, and
fulfill my basic needs. Eventually, my bicycle allowed me to
provide for myself when I began working a full time job at the age
of fourteen. My bicycle provided me with the socioeconomic
mobility necessary to escape. My bicycle saved my life.”
Team Manager Lindsay Goldman shared Robyn’s
application with teammate Julie Kuliecza, as they both lived in
Richmond, VA, and Julie was instantly enamored and eager to
partner with Robyn for the 2019 season. Robyn became one of our 10
ambassadors and shared their learning experiences from racing with
our whole team. They overcame so much adversity in life while
channeling their energy into riding, worked hard as a bike
messenger, and pushed to foster inclusivity in cycling,
encouraging those who identify as women, trans, non-binary, and/or
gender variant to find a welcome place in our sport.
Now Robyn is gone. They were hit by a truck
that initially left the scene and then reportedly returned after
witnesses signaled the driver to stop; he was quoted as saying he
didn’t realize he had hit someone. According to police, there have
already been 10 cyclist deaths in NYC this year alone. Every
single one of those is crushingly sad, but it’s so much more real
when you lose somebody you know. Robyn was part of our team. They
raced in our kit, they shared their stories with us, they made us
proud and hopefully had a chance to learn something from our team
as well. Now we are left with Robyn’s passion and words, their
memory, and another harsh reminder of a reality of cycling: the
roads are not a safe place for us and we all must work harder to
change that. This is so much bigger than anything else we care
about in cycling: bigger than races, sponsorship, training,
innovations in equipment, doping, anything, everything. Every
single person that rides a bike needs to care about safety and
survival on the roads. Our lives depend on it.
Robyn was a strong, beautiful, gutsy rider and
we hope you’ll join our team in remembering Robyn’s life and
spirit. Robyn loved to ride and did so fearlessly. In their own
words, “As a working cyclist, the vast majority of things which I
was once terrified of have happened to me. While riding, I’ve been
hit by cars, physically and sexually assaulted, cycled through
hurricanes and sub zero temperatures and small tornadoes
(seriously), been injured, and become lost; the list goes on.
Although to some extent I am still plagued by feelings of
intimidation as well as the fear of being seen as less legitimate
than other cyclists due to my lack of proper training, I will ride
on. I am no longer scared.” - Hagens Berman Supermint Pro Cycling
Team
A year ago we met them during the bicycle film
festival. Robyn had hopped on a bus with no place to stay just to
come and volunteer and meet people in the bicycle community. Last
week Robyn rode their track bike 400 miles from Richmond to
Brooklyn in 3 days. They stuck around to race at the velodrome and
work a few shifts in the city. On Monday morning in Manhattan a
delivery truck ran Robyn over from behind, crushing them to death.
The driver drove away and only came back to the scene because
someone had seen it and waved them down. Robyn was just
20 years old, with infinite enthusiasm and life ahead of them.
Drivers, please please be responsible with the crushing, life
changing power at your fingertips. - Conrad Carlson
Robyn was a Sweet Hart , saw what they wanted to achieve and went
for it with Everything + a Shit eating grin 🙏🏽👊🏼🚲💗
Robyn put on the Richmond leg of Triple Crown on 3 days notice (if
that) having no race organizing experience and Still made it
Happen💪🏽💪🏽
Robyn Rocked , Smiled , and was Going to be a Fucking Champ on /off
the Track - Morgan Hafer
We are all family and one of our family was killed on the job today.
I worked with Robyn in Richmond before I moved to DC, they ran
quickness for most of a year, started racing, and just moved to New
York a few weeks ago after deciding to bike from Richmond to New
York in 3 days on a fixed gear. Besides being a badass rider they
were an incredible person. They were tough, fuckin fearless, always
had a smile and just really nice. Both Richmond and New York are
hurting right now. Ride in power Robyn Hightman. - Dag Campbell
The Miraculous and Tragic Story of a life transformed by Cycling
By Peter Flax and photography by Victor Blue and Matt Eich
Bicycling, September 5, 2019
Over the past decade in New York City, more than 160,000 people have
been struck by motorists. More than 1,600 have been killed. In 2019
alone, drivers have caused a staggering 20 cyclist fatalities in the
city. Often missing from the uproar over these and other senseless
deaths across the country are the nuanced legacies of those whose
lives are cut short. Who were they? What did their lives mean? What
potential has been snatched away? This story―a chronicle of the life
and death of Robyn Hightman―reflects how much can be lost and the
devastating impact on those left behind.
This story does not begin or end on Sixth Avenue. That heartbreak in
New York City, which hardly defines the life of Robyn Hightman, will
come soon enough.
No, it’s more fitting if this story opens along the James River in
Richmond, Virginia. It’s a Saturday afternoon in May, and the
20-year-old is piloting a track bike into Great Shiplock Park.
Hightman―who chose to use the pronouns “they” and “them”―has been in
the saddle for almost six hours on a hot day without a stop, and
unclips before filling up a few water bottles. They’ve just finished
a round trip on the Capital Trail, a multi-use path that connects
Richmond to the state’s original capital in Williamsburg. Along that
solitary 101-mile journey, Hightman has rumbled over more than 55
wooden bridges and ridden past freshly planted corn fields and found
respite in long stretches shaded by sycamore and white maple.
This long day is going to get longer. Eight minutes later, Hightman
arcs their black All-City Cosmic Stallion back onto the Cap Trail.
Robyn will spin that 49x16 fixed gear until the sun goes down. The
second century will be completed a few minutes slower than the
first.
Imagine this young person, who two years earlier hadn’t ridden more
than a few miles at a time, pedaling westbound after 10 hours of
riding, still churning out 18 miles per hour—on track to finish an
11-and-a-half-hour double century.
That evening, Hightman would upload the 203-mile masterpiece to
Strava with a simple comment: “Honestly, sans being wildly
dehydrated, this wasn’t all that bad.”
People endure long bicycle rides for all sorts of reasons—to push
themselves and to cleanse themselves, to find themselves and
sometimes to lose themselves. Hightman had texted a friend two days
earlier and expressed a desire to “ride bikes and suffer a little
bit,” and now, cranking back into Richmond as the sky turned purple
and then black, they were riding for all those reasons and at least
a couple more.
Hightman’s last ride came 51 days later. It was the first hour of
their second day as a New York City bike messenger. Hightman cruised
northward on Sixth Avenue through Chelsea. It was a crisp Monday
morning—June 24th, the fourth day of summer. At 9:16 a.m., Robyn
picked up a parcel on Broome Street in Soho and turned onto Sixth
somewhere around Prince Street. The dispatcher at Samurai Messenger
Service had directed Hightman to head uptown toward the Flatiron
District.
Hightman crossed West 23rd Street, and it’s an open question now
whether the Freightliner box truck with New Jersey plates was behind
them or to their left. Robyn was in the righthand lane, exactly
where an experienced rider would set themselves up for a right turn
unto 24th Street. Their next stop, a building on Broadway between
24th and 25th, was two blocks away.
They never made it. At 9:24 there was a tremendous thump and within
seconds, two lanes of the street were littered with a smashed black
Lazer helmet and other gear. Witnesses told reporters who soon
descended on the scene that they’d seen Hightman’s body fly up into
the air.
The first call to 911 came in at 9:25 and an ambulance was
dispatched. Before emergency personnel arrived, construction workers
rushed into the street to render aid.
The precise details of what caused the crash remain unknown to the
public (as well as to Hightman’s family and friends). The NYPD’s
Collision Investigation Squad has reviewed at least three video
perspectives of the incident—there is a south-facing camera managed
by NYDOT on a lamppost on the corner of Sixth and 23rd, and banks
directly across from the impact spot on both sides of the street.
Witnesses have offered accounts to the police and to media that may
or may not all be accurate—that the truck was speeding, that a cab
or ride-share driver pulled out in front of Hightman, that they were
rear-ended or struck from the side. What is known from the police
department press release issued the day of the crash and the
subsequent certificate of death, is that Hightman was “struck and
run over by [the] truck,” that the truck driver initially left the
scene asserting he had no idea a collision had occurred, and that
the driver was issued five summonses at the scene for inspection
violations.
By the time Kelsey Leigh rolled up to the crash site, around 10:00
a.m., Hightman had been loaded into an ambulance for transport to
Bellevue Hospital. Leigh, a courier who was close with Hightman, had
been dropping off a package on 45th Street when a friend called and
asked if she knew a courier who rode a black All-City bike. She knew
two and one of them was Robyn.
Leigh doesn’t exactly remember the ride down to Chelsea; she
remembers repeatedly calling Hightman’s cell and the ringing that
never stopped. But when she got to the taped-off crash site, Leigh
observed things that she’ll never forget. “The first thing I saw was
the blood, bright red and all over the street,” she says. “And then
I saw the bike. I remember feeling like my stomach hit the floor as
my eyes moved from the front brake, to the fork, to the bar ends,
and the black bottle cage. All these unique parts that made up
Robyn’s bike.”
The box truck that had hit Robyn was parked around the corner, so
Leigh walked over with a friend. She says the driver, who was not
arrested or charged in connection with the incident, was sitting
inside a squad car, but the passenger was still in the cab. Leigh
says her friend had a heated conversation with the passenger who
claimed that Robyn must have fallen into the truck. “Robyn is one of
the most steady riders I know,” Leigh says. “Robyn doesn’t fall.”
Like a lot of daily riders in New York, Leigh has concerns about how
the NYPD has responded to the dangers that cyclists face on the
road. And as she watched the police clear the crash site, she felt a
growing frustration. “It all seemed very mechanical and quick, like
they were just doing a routine operation,” she says. “I felt like
they weren’t taking enough pictures, weren’t documenting the scene
enough, not doing enough.”M oments later, after walking me through
details like the angle of Robyn’s handlebar and the positioning of
the messenger bag, Leigh expresses a broader concern that’s making
her sick: She can’t understand how drivers can hit someone and not
feel it.
Robyn Avril Hightman was born on September 19, 1998, at Martha
Jefferson Hospital in Charlottesville, Virginia. Jay Hightman,
Robyn’s father, says his daughter’s name was a tribute to a
high-school friend of his, Robyn Hess, who died of cancer when she
was 19 or 20. He’d been devastated. “I said that if I ever had a
girl, I’d give her the same name,” he says with his voice cracking.
From the start, Hightman was precocious. Robyn’s mother, Kymberlee
(who asked that her last name be withheld for privacy), recalls
taking her daughter for a well visit when they were three. “The
doctor asked Robyn if they knew their letters,” says Kymberlee. “And
Robyn wrote out their name—upside down so the doctor could read it
easier.”
Less than two years after Robyn was born, Jay and Kymberlee had
another girl, Rachel. When both girls were young, their parents
split up and Kymberlee had custody of the children.
Robyn was an excellent student, taking AP classes at Charlottesville
High, and had a busy extracurricular life. Kymberlee proudly
recounts the breadth of her daughter’s interests. Robyn was an avid
Girl Scout, a contra dancing enthusiast, and a flute player the
Stonewall Brigade Band, the oldest continuously run community band
in the nation.
Rachel says Robyn could grab a random instrument and quickly show
proficiency. “They could pick up a piece of music and play it,” says
Kymberlee. “They could draw and paint anything.”
Since childhood, Robyn had shown interest in helping others and had
one day hoped to teach art to disadvantaged children. In their
senior year, Robyn got into the art school at the School of the Art
Institute of Chicago, a program that’s typically rated among the top
five in the nation. Robyn’s grandmother, Leena Miller, remembers
taking Robyn for a campus tour. “they were just lit up,” says
Miller. “But then they looked at me and said, ‘It doesn’t seem to be
a good idea to take on $300,000 in debt if I want to teach art to
inner-city kids.” In the end, Robyn turned down the slot.
Like art, bikes were a part of Hightman’s life from the start.
Robyn’s father had taken up cycling in a big way in the late ’70s,
wrenched in a shop in the ’80s, and eventually got into tandem
riding. Robyn started riding a red tricycle at the age of 3—and then
graduated to a light blue kids’ bike he bought at Toys R Us. Jay
remembers a shop visit when Robyn was in eighth grade. He got Rachel
a mixte bike with tires that could go off-road, but Robyn lusted for
a dark blue BMX bike. That’s the bike Robyn rode throughout high
school.
Rachel—who says she last saw Robyn more than three years
ago—describes summers with her sister in Charlottesville with some
romance. “We had a pool pass, we had a library card, and we had our
bikes,” she says.
Rachel is entering her second year at the University of Virginia and
has become a regular cyclist herself. She says she understands the
role the bike played in her big sister’s life. Rachel likes to train
and do triathlons and appreciates the calming feel of a hard bike
ride. “We only lived an hour apart,” she says, choking up. “And we
never got to go on a bike ride together.”
Robyn had broken contact with several family members, but Rachel
says she had hoped they would reconnect. Perhaps because Robyn’s
intense passion for cycling developed more recently, some in the
family feel Robyn’s engagement with bikes has been over emphasized
compared with their childhood and adolescent interests. “Cycling is
only two percent of their story,” says Kymberlee. “And 98 percent of
it is still out there.”
The ghost bike is chained to a lamppost in front of the Sixth Avenue
branch of Chase Bank. It’s a track bike with horizontal dropouts, no
brakes, and a single 14-tooth cog.
It’s a week after an emotional ghost bike ceremony that took place
four days after Robyn’s death, and now most of the bouquets are
dried and fragile. A box holds a few dozen votives and a handful are
still flickering. A Colnago cycling cap and one that says QUEENS are
draped on the bike, as are a Bicycle Film Festival Staff lanyard, a
patch from the DFL bike club in Richmond, and a tiny plastic unicorn
with green hooves.
The bike was painted by Robyn’s friend Cheylene Tattersall and
teammates on the Spin Peaks racing team, an inclusive crew of nine
women who raced at the Kissena Velodrome in Queens. The day before
they were killed, Hightman had been throwing it down in match
sprints on the Kissena homestretch wearing the Spin Peaks kit.
Even for people who care deeply about the issue, the news cycle of
these tragic deaths can be so rapid that the events can seem
distilled down to 24 to 48 hours of intense mourning and then a
preoccupation with the data—how many cyclists have been killed so
far this year in New York, for instance. What’s missing from this
dynamic is a deeper examination of what’s really lost in these fatal
crashes—people like Robyn Hightman, whose lives and potential are
cruelly cut short; the innocence of friends and family who are
undone by grief; and the uncomplicated functionality and joy that
everyday riders get from pedaling a bicycle.
Tattersall and other friends organized the memorial procession that
rode across the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to lower Manhattan
on June 28th, and then up to the crash site. Members of the Spin
Peaks team took turns carrying the white bike. “I had it the last 10
blocks,” Tattersall says. “At the end, I walked it through the crowd
of people who were waiting at the scene. It was intense—the closest
I’ve ever felt to someone I’ve lost this way.”
On that emotional evening, friends and couriers and others in New
York’s bike community came out in force to mourn together, to
express love for Robyn and grief for the tragedy and anger at city
officials who didn’t seem to be using their full powers to protect
cyclists.
Exactly one week after Hightman was killed, a 28-year-old artist
named Devra Freelander was killed by someone driving a cement truck
in Brooklyn. And before July was over, three more riders were
killed, bringing the death toll in New York up to 18 for the year,
nearly double the total for all of 2018. (At the time of
publication, the toll has risen to 20.)
As heartbreak and pressure rose among New York City cyclists, Mayor
Bill DeBlasio introduced new measures—first a three-week crackdown
on motorists and an initiative to stop ticketing cyclists after
fatal crashes, and then a $58 million infrastructure program
entitled the Green Wave—that represent positive but incomplete
steps.
American cyclists have come to understand this duality. They know
that if a few people die from a contaminated batch of arugula,
government officials will take steps to fully contain the problem.
Yet despite record numbers of drivers killing cyclists, the pace of
upgrading infrastructure, legal protections, law enforcement, and
judicial follow-through to make riders safer lags woefully behind.
One consequence of this duality is ghost bikes like the one chained
on Sixth Avenue. Just a few feet north of that white bike are two
signs—one stating the citywide speed limit of 25 mph and a smaller
blue rectangular sign that says “Sixth Avenue SLOW ZONE.” The avenue
is not congested on this particular morning and the flow of traffic
is considerably faster than 25 mph.
About 48 hours later in Richmond, Virginia, I’m standing in front of
a gnarled mulberry tree in Federal Park, where more than 150 friends
had gathered on the night Robyn died. There are more votives and
handwritten notes, photos and flowers, and a painted sign that says
“Ride easy Robyn.”
Around the block on the corner of Rolland and Main, there’s a
white-painted road bike festooned with artificial flowers and
chained to a lamp post. It’s for another cyclist—Corey Frazier, a
21-year-old VCU student who was killed on this block in March 2018.
By the time of Frazier’s death, Robyn had been hit and injured twice
by drivers and had become involved in Richmond’s advocacy efforts.
“We’re a community,” Robyn said in a news article about the ghost
bike installation for Frazier. “We know something like this could
happen to any of us.”
Afew hours after Hightman’s death was confirmed, the Hagens
Berman-Supermint team posted on Instagram what it described as an
excerpt from Robyn’s application essay for an ambassadorship with
the team. In it, Hightman talked about the “independence” the bike
had provided and said that cycling had helped them overcome numerous
life challenges.
From the time of the Hightmans’ divorce until 2014, Robyn lived with
Kymberlee in a rural area east of Charlottesville. But by the end of
high school, Robyn had resided with more than a half dozen
caretakers including Jay, family friends, a teacher, and eventually
was in foster care.
Rachel McLaughlin, the high school art teacher who housed Robyn for
a period, described Robyn as “broken” and said they wore makeup
“like a mask.” One social worker who worked with Robyn during this
time (and asked not to be identified) said that adults who cared for
them “struggled with pushback.” According to friends who spoke to me
for this story, Robyn regarded their childhood and adolescence as
one of instability and struggle, which shaped their outlook on life.
Not long after graduating high school, Robyn moved 70 miles east to
Richmond and began to assemble a new life—an identity shaped by art,
bicycles, and new friends. Soon after the move, McLaughin visited
Robyn. “I noticed for the first time they weren't wearing a huge
sheet of makeup,” she says.
Robyn enrolled in the art program at Virginia Commonwealth
University in Richmond. Tyler Hurwitz remembers meeting Robyn during
the first week in school. The two quickly became friends.
Robyn’s approach to art school was next level. Hurwitz recalls an
early project where everyone was asked to make a monument. “Most
everyone did something elemental with papier-mâché,” says Hurwitz.
But Robyn quickly learned how to weld, and then fabricated an
elaborate metal womb. For another project, Hightman constructed a
10-foot-wide loom.
Hurwitz says she overheard Robyn talking to a caseworker on multiple
occasions about art projects. Hightman had qualified for a state
program that provides educational financing to former foster youth.
College is a stressful enterprise for anyone who’s financially
insecure, but it’s especially tough for art students, where nearly
every project requires costly supplies.
In the spring, Robyn decided to stop studying at VCU. Surely
financial stresses played a role, but the truth is that during the
course of that year in Richmond, Robyn had become passionate about a
new interest.
Robyn’s love affair with bikes started on a Wednesday night. There’s
this bike club in Richmond called DFL—the sort of punk urban bike
community that’s flourishing in every American city, fueled by young
people who are disconnected from traditional racing culture and
instead seek adventure and experience on dark city streets. DFL does
its big weekly ride on Wednesday nights, and one evening in the
summer of 2017, someone split the crew into two squads and said that
whichever team could return to Scuffletown Park with more random
people on bikes would win.
Mohammad Jamali remembers that evening with a kind of reverence. His
team was cruising past the corner of Lombardy and Grace Streets when
they came upon a young woman riding a red Schwinn cruiser with a
front basket full of yarn. Hightman pedaled with them to Scuffletown
Park and went out the next night for a ride through a cemetery and
became an instant regular.
DFL member Matt Segal met Hightman at Rag & Bones, a bike
collective in Richmond’s Northside neighborhood, and they eventually
grew close. “Robyn was riding the bike to get away from something,”
he says, describing how Hightman had talked to him about foster
homes and feelings of instability that defined their youth. “They
had to keep pedaling to keep the crazy away.”
By the time Hightman formally became a member of DFL in June 2018,
they already were working as a bike courier—first for Uber Eats and
then for a Richmond-based company called Quickness RVA. That same
month, Hightman recorded their first ride on Strava. In the
following year, they’d ride 7,200 miles in 349 rides.
Couriers who worked with Hightman were impressed by how hard they
rode. “They always went fast,” says D. Russell, who worked with
Robyn at Quickness RVA. “It was like they were always training for a
race. Which I guess they were.” There were funny moments, too, says
Russell, recalling how Robyn liked to twerk on a cargo bike while
singing along with the rap anthem “Tempo” by Lizzo and Missy
Elliott.
Robyn demonstrated so much passion and competence that Quickness RVA
owner Frank Bucalo soon made Hightman a de facto manager. They
became a fixture at the Korean restaurant J KOJI, running point for
Quickness RVA’s food-delivery enterprise. In the hours after the
tragedy on Sixth Avenue, someone found a pair of Hightman’s shoes in
the Quickness RVA office, and during the memorial ride that night,
friends tossed the white-and-grey camo Converse All-Stars over the
power lines in front of J KOJI. They still dangle above Robyn’s
former command center.
Even though he was more than 300 miles away in Richmond, Robbie Wood
knew Robyn was in trouble before some people in New York did. The
photos of the crash scene were on social media, and Wood—the
operator of Cyclus Bike Shop—can spot wheels he’s built a mile away.
And there on Sixth Avenue where the hoops—with H Plus Son SL42 rims,
All-City track hubs, and silver spokes—he’d laced for his friend.
Texts and emails and calls were flying around all the bike
communities that Robyn was a part of along the Eastern seaboard. It
was an excruciating hour or two.
Aware that specific responsibilities would fall to Robyn’s family,
Cheylene Tattersall tracked down Hightman’s next of kin in Virginia.
That night, Rachel and Kymberlee agreed that Robyn’s corneas, the
only organs deemed viable, should be donated to a worthy recipient.
Also that night, Cheylene attended a vigil ride that ended at the
crash site, and the raw emotion and chaos of that event hit her
hard. She came home and started planning a more reverential ghost
bike ride and launched a GoFundMe campaign to help cover funeral
costs.
The first thing that Kymberlee and Rachel did after arriving in New
York on Tuesday was to visit the medical examiner’s family services
center in New York to identify Robyn’s body. They were taken into a
cold tile room, where a staffer put an image of Robyn up on a
computer screen. Rachel couldn’t bear to look. Kymberlee, however,
had no real choice. “It was a profile view—I think it was the best
view possible. I could see that they had a scrape on the right side
of their head,” she says. “It’s not something you’d ever want to
do.”
The family was presented a death certificate that listed blunt-force
trauma to the head and torso as the official cause of death. Then
arrangements were made for Robyn’s cremation with money from the
GoFundMe account.
Folks in the cycling community in New York and Virginia had hatched
a plan to stage a ride from Brooklyn to Richmond with some or all of
Robyn’s ashes as a way to honor and mourn their friend in what they
felt was a manner that reflected Hightman’s own journey. But the
family declined to part with Robyn’s ashes. “Robyn’s mother looked
me in the eye and said we’re not leaving New York without Robyn,”
Tattersall recalls. “That was a total rip-me-open moment.”
Kymberlee had no comment about the status of her daughter’s ashes,
but Rachel said that her sister’s ashes would be stored in so-called
living urns, where plants anchor their roots in the remains of a
loved one. (Hightman’s friends plan to bronze exact replicas of
Robyn’s Fi’zi:k shoes, which were recovered from the crash, for
multiple memorials.)
Tattersall is philosophical about the situation. “Everybody needs an
opportunity to mourn,” she says, mentioning how now, weeks after
Robyn’s death, that she’s finding the space to mourn properly.
It’s worth noting that, given the uncertain circumstances
surrounding the collision and allegations regarding conditions on
the road, the incident could lead to a wrongful death suit by the
family against any number of entities, according to some lawyers. “I
have no doubt that it is a good candidate for a big civil case,”
says Daniel Flanzig, a cycling attorney in New York who is familiar
with the incident. “Even in the worst case, there’s no way it was
Robyn’s fault.”
I spoke with multiple attorneys familiar with reported accounts of
Hightman’s crash and all echoed that view—arguing that it was in
broad daylight on a flat street, that cyclists are legally allowed
to leave a New York City bike lane if it’s obstructed, and how it’s
unlawful for motorists to enter a traffic lane if conditions aren’t
safe.
Some news and police accounts in the days after Robyn’s death
suggested that Hightman might somehow be negligent. A story on one
CBS outlet indicated that “there have been no charges in the crash
after police determined the cyclist was not in the bike lane and was
traveling between vehicles when they were struck.” And a writer with
Gothamist interviewed an NYPD officer who was ticketing cyclists the
day after Hightman’s death a block from the crash site—a common
crackdown tactic after fatal crashes in New York. “It’s sad, but
it’s sad that they were off the bike lane, you know?” the officer
reportedly told the reporter. “Maybe if they had been on the bike
lane, maybe they’d still be alive.”
One afternoon, 10 days after Robyn’s death, I rent a CitiBike and
retrace the end of their final ride, pedaling northbound up Sixth
Avenue from Greenwich Village into Chelsea. I stick to the
parking-protected bike lane (where parked vehicles provide a
physical barrier to passing traffic) that lines the west side of the
street. Along that mile-long stretch I encounter the following: open
car doors, a couple skateboarders, trucks unloading goods, scores of
pedestrians, a delivery guy pedaling southbound, about 10
construction zones, broken pavement, one police car, and a nice lady
walking a pug on a retractable leash. It seems like a protected bike
lane in name more than in practice.
Then I dock my bike and walk along Sixth Avenue, talking to street
vendors, looking for someone who witnessed the crash. One man
selling baseball caps across the street from the ghost bike says he
was there when it happened. “It was awful and I don’t want to talk
about it,” says the man, who has a Caribbean accent and declines to
give his name. “I don’t want any trouble, you know?”
But then two vendors wander over and point to a steel plate, a
couple inches thick and maybe 10 feet by 6 feet, that lies
diagonally in the road. These are common in New York when crews are
working on water mains or sewers—sometimes they have carefully
graded asphalt edges to make them safer for cyclists and sometimes
they don’t. The vendors told me that on the day of Hightman’s crash
three or four of those plates were lying in the bike lane, and that
city officials came around the next day and cited the responsible
contractors. Within hours, they said, the plates were gone.
In my conversations with bike messengers and experienced urban
riders in New York, everyone insists that skilled and fast riders
like Hightman would almost always ride with the traffic on Sixth
Avenue rather than tackle the crowded chaos of the bike lane. And
veteran riders who knew Robyn dismiss any suggestion that Hightman
was riding in the wrong place or acting recklessly.
“When you’re a messenger, your senses sharpen,” says Kit Melton, a
friend of Robyn’s and a courier with Samurai. “You really get to
feel the flow of the street. But that confidence doesn’t make you do
anything rash.”
Perhaps no one embodies that sort of confidence more than Lucas
Brunelle. The filmmaker and legendary urban rider says he first met
Hightman at an alley cat race in Richmond a few years ago and shared
about a half-dozen rides with them. “A lot of messengers either have
skills or watts, but not a ton have both,” he says. “Robyn had
traffic skills, navigation skills and tremendous speed.”
Two days after Hightman’s death, Brunelle posted an Instagram video
containing footage of Hightman riding in New York with the simple
comment “the angels came too soon.”
Talking about the particular chaos that led that box truck to hit
Robyn, Brunelle states a dark truth: “Certain things can happen on
the road where, in the end, it doesn’t matter how good you are.”
The filmmaker says that Hightman was like “the little sister I never
had,” because of how they pursued their dreams and spoke their mind
and rode with abandon just like he does. Robyn was not the sort of
person to have death-bed regrets, he says. “I like that old proverb
about the definition of hell—that on your last day on earth, the
person you became meets the person you could’ve become and realizes
the things you could’ve done,” he says. “Robyn didn’t wish they
could do things—they just did things.”
Hightman’s network in Richmond was tight and deep, but something was
pulling them to New York. Segal says Richmond is a kind of way
station for young bike people he’s met over the years, a place for
some school or a couple of years of work, and then they’d catapult
to bigger things or at least bigger places.
Tattersall met Hightman in June 2018, when they were both volunteers
at the Bicycle Film Festival, a New York-based event founded by
filmmaker Brendt Barbur that celebrates bike culture through film
showings, music, and art exhibitions. They hit it off instantly.
The next evening, Hightman mentioned sleeping on the A train the
previous night. Tattersall told her new friend that they would
definitely not spend that night rumbling out to Far Rockaway and
offered up her couch. (For the festival this past June, Hightman
rode a track bike from Richmond to New York—a three-day ride that
covered 363 miles.)
Tattersall’s apartment became Robyn’s home base in New York.
Tattersall also led the Spin Peaks team at the Kissena Velodrome
where Hightman had started racing this past spring. Tattersall and
other friends laugh at how Hightman expressed doubts about their
potential as a track racer. Robyn’s initiation to the track came
this past April during an event dubbed the 6 Days of Kissena, a
contest spread over three weekends. “Robyn came out as a Cat 5 and
just slaughtered everyone,” says Melton.
Tattersall—who says that Hightman felt like her little sister and
brought “pure energy” wherever they went—saw her friend for the last
time on the Thursday night before the crash. Hightman had gone to
Cheylene’s apartment to eat a burrito and grab a helmet to use at
the track after riding their first New York City courier shift.
I ask Tattersall if she remembers the last thing she said to Robyn
that night. “No,” she says, starting to cry. “I didn’t pay close
enough attention to that moment.”
Frank Bucalo and his wife had Robyn over for dinner the night before
Hightman died. Bucalo is the owner of Quickness RVA, but moved to
New York in 2016 after his wife got a job there; since then the
longtime courier has been riding for Samurai.
During that dinner, Frank and Robyn talked about Hightman’s first
official shift the previous Thursday and about the shift Robyn would
ride the next morning. Bucalo thought Hightman needed a bigger bag,
so he lent them a Road Runner Americano, a huge black backpack with
compression straps and a blue liner that’s a classic among
messengers.
They parted ways around 11:00 or 11:30—Robyn had to work in the
morning. The last thing that Bucalo said to Hightman was “see you
tomorrow,” when Robyn had planned to return the bag. “I’d usually
say ‘ride safe’ to Robyn in a situation like that, but I didn’t say
it that time,” he says with his voice cracking.
In the morning, Bucalo got a text from a courier who’d come upon the
crash site around 10:00 a.m. It wasn’t clear yet who the victim was,
but soon pictures of the bike and that big black bag were on social
media.
Bucalo and his wife raced over to Bellevue and spent 20 tense
minutes in a waiting room. They talked about the kind of recovery
Robyn would face from such a big crash. “But then five doctors and a
grief counselor came into the room and we knew it was more,” he
says. At this point, a friend named Jose, who’d ridden across the
Williamsburg Bridge with Robyn that morning—thus being the last
friend to see them alive—was there, too.
After leaving the hospital, Bucalo, along with his wife and Jose,
walked across town to the crash site. There he met a man who said
he’d held Robyn’s hand until emergency personnel arrived. The man
said he’d repeatedly told Hightman “everything is going to be OK”
even as he took Robyn’s pulse and felt it fading away.
here remains a public perception that most cyclists are entitled
hobbyists, but even normally privileged individuals who get on a
bike can experience what it feels like to exist in the margins of
society, where one’s right to exist without threats is frequently
challenged by systematic animosity, flawed infrastructure, and
inadequate legal protections. And for someone like Robyn
Hightman—who had struggled to find stability in their daily life and
who rode a bike as their primary mode of transportation and
employment—that marginalization was exponentially more intense.
Robyn had endeavored to find a safe place through riding and was
denied in the most extreme way possible.
As I did the reporting for this story—talking to more than 30 people
who knew Robyn well—one unexpected theme emerged: Every single
person who rides a bike told me about getting hit.
Brendt Barbur, who founded the Bicycle Film Festival, was hit by a
driver operating a bus in 2001—just seven blocks from where Robyn
was killed. Robbie Wood was hit in Richmond—he was stopped at a
traffic light and someone plowed into the car behind him. Richmond
friend Brantley Tyndall got brake checked in 2016. Mitchell McKenna,
another Richmond friend, says his bike got wedged under vehicle
after the driver hit him from behind and police issued McKenna a
citation. Frank Bucalo, who has a broken front tooth from a 2005
crash that he’s left unrepaired as a reminder, was hit last October
by a pizza delivery guy in Brooklyn in an incident that left him
with broken bones and physical therapy bills.
Jay Hightman says that he crashed in Charlottesville after a driver
swerved into him. Rachel Hightman says she’s been hit a few times,
and just 19 days after her sister was killed she was hit again.
Kit Melton has been hit and has lost friends, and now after
Hightman’s death the veteran bike messenger says she’s too scared to
ride. Melton’s life in New York has been defined and brightened by
riding bikes on a daily basis, but now she’s planning a move to
Colorado, where she can ride a mountain bike in the woods.
Melton asks to meet at a bakery in Bushwick. We were supposed to
meet in Soho but she lost her subway pass and thinking about
pedaling from Brooklyn to Manhattan overwhelmed her. She holds it
together for maybe 90 minutes but now she is trying to express the
loss and the guilt and the trauma of losing a best friend. They had
a bond—both were bike couriers and track racers. “Robyn was the
sister I always wanted,” she says.
Melton had wanted to go to Colorado for a long weekend in June so
she asked Robyn to cover her Monday shift at Samurai. That shift
turned out to be Hightman’s last. Melton hasn’t been able to ride
her bike since then. “I’m in a big pit of despair and I can’t ride,”
she says. “It’s shitty. My bike defines me and now I feel like a
shell of a person, a scared person. It’s a weird place to be
in—where the thing that gives me joy and strength and clarity makes
me anxious. It’s super fucked.”
Robyn stayed at Melton’s apartment the weekend before they died.
They saw each other there before Melton headed to the airport.
Hightman had just completed their first full day as a New York bike
courier. It had poured from morning until night, but Hightman had
plowed through a nine-hour day without screwing up a single delivery
or needing someone else to cover them. Still, Hightman questioned
whether they’d been good enough.
“I told Robyn, ‘You need to believe in yourself,’” says Melton. “I
mean, they did pretty damned great for a first day.”
“Oh my heart,” Hightman replied. “Thank you for your unrelenting
support and for believing in me.”
And then they hugged. “I told Robyn ‘I love you,’ and they gave me
the warmest hug I’ve ever had,” Melton says. “When I got on the
plane a few hours later, I could still feel it.”
Melton was in Eagle, Colorado, on Monday morning when someone texted
to ask what kind of bike Robyn had. Soon came an email from Samurai
saying that they thought Robyn was gone. “I remember being in the
mountains and just breaking down,” she says. “I felt so much grief
and so much guilt.” In that moment, Melton felt so far from New
York, so she walked out into the mountains and started gathering
wildflowers. She found the skull of an elk and placed it under a
tree and surrounded it with purple and yellow and white flowers.
I meet the guy wearing the blindfold right before I leave
Charlottesville. Robyn’s grandmother Leena takes me down to the
city’s historic downtown mall, the kind of outdoor promenade found
in many college towns. It’s a late afternoon on a summer Friday and
the wide brick walkway is pleasantly busy.
We stop at a storefront where Leena says that Robyn, as a junior and
senior in high school, used to play the flute for money. Hightman
had a basket with a little sign that said “college fund,” and often
would jam with other musicians busking on the mall.
A block or two later we run into David, a man with white hair and a
green T-shirt and a black blindfold. He’s standing with his arms
extended like he’s waiting to accept a gift or perhaps to pray. Next
to him is a sign inviting all passersby to share a hug—he’s not
asking for money; it’s more like an offering of universal love from
another era.
Leena says that Robyn and David knew each other from the period when
Robyn worked on the mall. She steps into a hug with David and
whispers that Robyn is gone.
When the hug ends, David pulls back his blindfold. His eyes are red.
“They had some problems, but they were was putting their life
together,” he says. “They kept going.”
That’s what Hightman had been doing for years—pushing joyfully hard
to move from one place to another. It was working. A new life
defined not by the circumstances of their youth but by friends and
bikes and candid conversation and raw energy and a desire to help
people through art. Maybe Kit Melton put it best: “Robyn was going
to do some shit.”
Back on the mall, David is rubbing his eyes. “The only things you
really know are that you come into this world and go out,” says the
man with the blindfold as he mourns Robyn Hightman. “All that
matters is what you do in between.”
