TUKWILA, Wash. — Justin Schutz and a friend walked to the place - "And that's right where it happened" - where he watched a woman he did not know die.
"And you can see right here, the end of the sidewalk," he told his friend. "And you just take your life in your hands."
He is talking about the lighted crosswalk on busy Southcenter Boulevard in the middle of the onramp to northbound I-5.
Chopper 7 was overhead Friday afternoon as the driver who hit 56-year-old Huimin Lin took a sobriety test.
He was found not to be impaired.
When Schutz was interviewed Saturday afternoon, he said he watched Lin activate the lights to the crosswalk.
"All I could think is, like, 'please either come to a halt, driver of the SUV or her, don't step out,'" he said. "I saw he was going too fast to stop.
And before I knew it, she was lifted into the air. The SUV had hit her."
We watched pedestrians using the crosswalk today.
If you look closely you can see, even as the lights flashed, this man pointed to the pedestrian sign, warning drivers to stop.
So another pedestrian, Alik Crockett, was asked:
"When you step out, how do you do that?"
"I look both ways before crossing the street," Crockett said. "Isn't that what you're supposed to be learning when you are a kid when you're crossing a street?"
Schutz insists he wants to do more.
"(So) that it turns into something that causes a change and make this safer," he said.
One idea he has is to create a pedestrian bridge so vehicles and pedestrians never have to meet.
KIRO will follow what, if anything, comes of his fight.
Cox Media Group
