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Minnesota News
Matt Sepic
Eagan

Eagan citizens demand safety changes to road where boy, 13, was killed

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Updated: 10:52 a.m.

Residents of Eagan are demanding pedestrian and bicycle safety upgrades to a stretch of road where a boy was struck and killed earlier this month. Patric Vitek was crossing a busy street when a car hit his bicycle. He was 13 years old.

The odds were stacked against Patric as he attempted to cross Diffley Road, which separates his neighborhood from Dakota Hills Middle School, where he was a seventh grader.

Diffley is four lanes with a speed limit of 45 mph. Even though there’s a school campus along the road, no school zone signs are posted. There are a few crosswalks, but not in the area between Lexington Avenue and Daniel Drive where Patric was fatally struck at 7:20 a.m. on Nov. 1.

Eagan police say the crash remains under investigation. The driver has not been charged, and authorities don’t suspect that he was impaired.

Residents of this south Twin Cities metro suburb have been raising concerns about bike and pedestrian safety for years. More than 100 came to a forum Tuesday evening organized by state Rep. Laurie Halverson, DFL-Eagan.

“We are a community that’s in a lot of pain. We are a community that’s experienced a tragedy and a loss that no community wants to experience,” Halverson said.

Eagan residents said it shouldn’t have taken the death of a child for city and county leaders to act.

Julie McMan, whose seventh-grade daughter knew Patric, noted that there were similar meetings about safety last November and again in February.

“This could’ve been resolved the day after, the week after. Maybe not to everybody’s complete satisfaction, but it could’ve been taken care of already. And if I have to go stand in the gap for kids this spring, so that they can freakin’ cross there, I’m going to do that every afternoon,” she said.

But city, county, and state officials say making the upgrades — or even posting school zone signs — is a complex process, not least because Diffley is a county road. Making changes involves approval at multiple levels of government.

Jim Carlson, a Democrat who represents the area in the Minnesota Senate, said he’s revived a push for a pedestrian tunnel under Diffley Road so students have a safe place to cross. And last week, the city of Eagan and the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school district said in a statement that they’ll “seek all approvals necessary to have a full school zone” by early January.

Correction note: This story has been corrected to reflect that the incident happened between Lexington Avenue and Daniel Drive.