Posted Tuesday, September 23rd on my myspace and facebook:
Hey guys. I’m normally too shy to post bulletins, but I’m making an exception for this. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so strongly about anything. It’s important. And it’s long, I know; read it anyway. If anything’s worth your time it’s this.
A week ago tonight a five year old girl named Alyssa Castillo was hit and killed on my street by another neighbor. She was riding her bike after dark. She came out from behind a pile of fallen tree limbs that were stacked way too high on the curb, and he didn’t see her until it was too late. She was run over with both tires. Her lungs were crushed and her skull was split open. She died almost instantly.
He wasn’t drunk.
He wasn’t speeding.
It could have been anyone behind the wheel of that truck. My next-door neighbor, my mother, my brother, me, or you. It could have been any child under that car’s wheels.
The neighborhood built a memorial in front of the Castillo house. My brother made a cross with Alyssa’s name on it, during a candlelight vigil every person, at least fifty people, laid a flower down in front of it for her, and there are candles burning in front of it every night. There’s still green spray paint in the street where investigators marked the location of the truck’s tires, the bicycle, and the body. And I still see cars come flying through my subdivision, not only strangers who must have seen the cross and the spray paint and chose to keep speeding anyway, but people who live in this neighborhood, people who were there the night that Alyssa died, who saw the lights and the ambulance and that tiny body covered up with a sheet, who watched Alyssa’s mother collapse in the driveway when she found out that her daughter hadn’t survived.
I know that this kind of thing happens often enough that it doesn’t even faze most people. I get it. If I’d only seen it on the news or read it on the internet, it wouldn’t have fazed me either. It apparently didn’t even faze some people who witnessed it. The thing is, though, it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t shake our heads and think “how sad” and move on. We shouldn’t just chalk it up to unfortunate conditions caused by the hurricane and fall back into complacency. Bear with me because it’s cliched, but it’s true that everyone should be outraged.
It takes so little to ensure that this doesn’t happen to another child. You can write to your local suits, petition for the speed limit in your neighborhood to be lowered, demand to know why, if school zones must be 20 mph, residential streets should be 30 mph. You can petition for Children at Play signs. You can buy one of Keep Kids Alive Drive 25’s signs or you can make your own. You can do that, and someone needs to.
But you can also just start with yourself. You can drive slowly through residential areas. You can drive even slower at night or when you’re tired and take special notice of who or what might be on the sidewalks. You can report street lights that aren’t working. You can make sure your garbage isn’t piled high enough to block an oncoming car’s view of a child. You can avoid parking on the street if you can. And most importantly, you can talk. Tell your kids, your neighbors’ kids, your brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and cousins to look both ways before they go into the street, and explain to them why they can’t run out from behind parked cars or trash bags. You can talk to their parents. Tell them about Alyssa. Tell them never to let their kids play unattended. Tell them how they can help.
You can talk to anyone you know who drives. You can talk to anyone you don’t know who drives. You can copy this message, paste it into a set of quotation marks and repost it, or you can not. You can do whatever you’re comfortable with.
Just tell somebody.
RIP Alyssa Castillo
9 – 16 – 08
Never Forgotten
