Death of 3-year-old prompts urgent calls for pedestrian safety
ROSEVILLE, Minn. – Public safety officials are urging drivers and pedestrians to be more aware of each other after a 3-year-old girl was struck and killed near the Roseville-St. Paul border.
Roseville police say the crash happened at about 8:30 p.m. at the intersection of Larpenteur Avenue and Galtier Street; a 47-year-old man was also critically hurt. The driver of the vehicle, a 75-year-old Roseville woman, stayed at the scene and is cooperating with investigators.
"This is tragic," Vito Soro, Chair of the North End Neighborhood Organization, lamented to WCCO. "It shouldn't happen in any neighborhood and it shouldn't happen here."
The surrounding area to the intersection includes a school, a church, an apartment complex, and a neighborhood. According to Soro, the tragic irony of the incident is that this corridor has been a model for the kind of safety improvements coming to other busy thoroughfares in St. Paul.
"Larpenteur Avenue, as recently as five years ago, used to be much worse," Soro explained. "It was a four-lane road with two lanes of traffic in both directions, which was incredibly unsafe for pedestrians. The road could be a lot worse and a lot of the roads in the North End – Maryland [Avenue], Rice [Street], Dale [Street] – all have work scheduled to be done."
100 Days of Danger
The toddler's death was actually the first of two collisions killing a pedestrian in Saint Paul on Wednesday; investigators say a man on a motorcycle slammed into a man walking in the middle of Warner Road near the Highway 52 bridge.
According to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety, preliminary data counts 16 pedestrian deaths so far this year.
The 100 days between Memorial Day and Labor Day, moreover, are notorious for being the most dangerous time of year on the roads because of the increased congestion. DPS officers wrote in a blog post that this period last year "proved particularly tragic" with 167 traffic deaths - a 25% increase compared to 2020 and 30% increase compared to 2019.
Additionally, the 488 overall traffic deaths in 2021 was by far the highest in more than a decade, according to preliminary data.
