This ghost bike honoring community activist Debra Prokop was installed and maintained by a neighbor who came upon the scene of her fatal accident seconds after it happened, at E 44th and Ave G in the Hyde Park area of Austin.
From the Bicycle Austin website: (
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"Post by user ggw:
"FWIW I was the one painting the sign in the intersection. Wish I was a better artist, but then I knew it would be about the art, and not about Debra.
I painted it because I came upon the accident about 30 seconds after it happened. I'll go to my grave with the image of her laying, inert, in the middle of Ave. G, with people with phones to their ears and hurrying to her body, and me turning to see the guy sitting on the pavement next to his pickup truck saying over and over, "I didn't see her".
I had some very significant deaths in my close social circle in 2012, and it caused me to wonder at my repainting Debra's commemoration every year (more when it would become defaced). I knew Debra Prokop through our memebership in Hyde Park Neighborhood Association. She was not a close friend.
When the city of Austin repaved all the cross streets in Hyde Park a couple months ago I decided that 10 years of mourning, however shallow or deep, is enough. I don't want "mourning" to be a signficant part of my remaining life.
I am content to see a more institutionalized monument like the White Bike maintained by a wider community. . . .
[a second post]
The red pickup truck was past a straight line formed by the 44th street south curbs. It wasn't so far into the intersection that another vehicle would have to swerve to negotiate 44th.
More detail than that I cannot remember.
I did not see Debra get hit. I came to the intersection from West 44th. Saw the guy sitting by his truck, heard what he said, looked north, saw Debra on her back with her arms and legs making a star pattern in the middle of the road, and dead. It seems to me that Debra had been knocked off the bike and she rolled to her resting place, which is many yards down hill to the north from where I stood. There was a woman with a phone to her ear and she was hurrying toward Debra from the North and was about 10 feet away.
There was a man just to the east of that woman. There was other activity farther away. I think I recall noise, it may have been shouts.
Reports later said that the bike was under the truck. I don't even remember seeing the bike. But since I saw Debra riding on other occasions, I would have known that she had been on her bike. Those details, I guess, just didn't seem important once I realized it was Debra and she wasn't moving. I do remember wishing that she was just hurt.. unconscious. I really felt utterly powerless.
As I mentioned earlier, at this late date I don't really want to dwell on it. Her 2 childern are adults now. I never saw them again after the memorial in Shipe Park somewhat later."
From the Austin American Statesman via Bicycle Austin: (
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"Wreck kills Hyde Park activist, Mother of two had been concerned about traffic safety in her neighborhood
by Claire Osborn, Austin American-Statesman, 05-22-2001, p. B1
Last week Debra Prokop was supposed to speak before the Austin planning commission in support of a plan that included improving traffic safety in her Hyde Park neighborhood. The hearing was postponed, and Prokop died five days later, after she was hit by a pickup while riding her bicycle a few blocks from home.
Her death stunned neighbors, who said Prokop, 45, got involved in whatever her neighborhood had to offer, from gathering signatures on petitions to kneeling in the dirt of people's yards, working with their plants. "She was a neat kind of vestige of old hippies, grown up and raising kids and cats and plants in old-time Hyde Park," said Terri Myers, a friend. "She loved her old ramshackle house, and she loved her kids, and she was out there fighting the good fight."
Prokop, a resident of Hyde Park since 1973, had been an election judge and chaired the Hyde Park Homes tour. She spent tedious hours typing minutes of meetings the neighborhood association held as part of an endless fight with Hyde Park Baptist Church over its expansion plans. Prokop, a divorced mother of two girls, didn't own a car but rode her bike everywhere to take care of her year-old gardening business.
Her landscape clients included the Hyde Park Marketplace, Kerbey Lane Cafe and her neighbors. Friends said they think she was on her way to water plants for a friend when the fatal collision occurred about 4:35 p.m. Saturday.
Prokop was riding her bicycle east on 44th Street when she was struck by a Ford pickup traveling north on Avenue G, police said. The truck hit her in the middle of the intersection, which is a four-way stop, investigators said. Detectives were trying Monday to determine who failed to yield the right of way. The driver of the pickup was 36-year-old Neil D. Lawler of Austin, police said.
Prokop, who was not wearing a helmet, died of head injuries at 8:18 a.m. Sunday at Brackenridge Hospital. A friend said Prokop had been concerned about how safe neighborhood streets were for her daughters, 11 and 7. "She would talk about people speeding in the neighborhood and wanted to get speed bumps in the street," Maria Dallman said.
Funeral arrangements are pending. Survivors include her daughters, Evelyn and Erica Bodenschatz; her father, Joe Prokop of New Jersey; and her brother, Rick Prokop of California."
Out condolences to the family.