Police Try to Resolve Fault for Calif. Crosswalk Crash

Police were reviewing grainy surveillance video Friday to help them determine who was at fault when a car plowed into two women and the two small children they were pushing in strollers across a Santa Ana street.

Santa Ana police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said a camera at a nearby preschool captured the collision, but it was not immediately clear who was at fault when the family was hit Thursday afternoon while crossing Civic Center Drive in an unmarked crosswalk.

The driver of the Volvo sedan that hit them apparently didn’t see a mother and her niece, who were pushing the mother’s 3-year-old and 1-year-old children in strollers, police said.

The women and 3-year-old were seriously injured but in stable condition late Thursday. The 1-year-old suffered minor injuries and the mother’s 5-year-old son, who was also with the family, was not hit, Bertagna said.

The driver was taken to the hospital because of a pre-existing medical condition. Police declined to reveal the condition.

Police say traffic fatalities have declined in the densely populated city of 325,000 in the heart of Orange County, but more than half those reported annually involve pedestrians.

Santa Ana has been grappling with pedestrian safety for years. In the city’s downtown, families often walk and push small children in strollers in sharp contrast to the suburban sprawl seen elsewhere in Orange County.

Much of that is because the city has a sizable population of immigrants, many who don’t have driver’s licenses, said Kristen Day, a professor of urban planning at NYU-Poly who used to work in Orange County. More than three-fourths of residents are Hispanic and roughly half were born abroad, census statistics show.

“It’s a bad juxtaposition of a lot of heavy traffic streets with high speed limits and a walking-dependent immigrant population,” Day said. “Santa Ana is a place where those come together.”

A little over a decade ago, Santa Ana started a campaign to encourage pedestrian safety with pedestrian fatalities in the double digits.

Officers discussed pedestrian safety in the schools and cited violators on the streets but such programs were discontinued because of a lack of funding, said Sgt. Norm Gielda, head of the police’s collision investigation unit.

Even so, pedestrian fatalities are down today compared with the past. In 2010, the city reported nine traffic fatalities, including five pedestrians. A year earlier, 11 traffic deaths were reported, including seven pedestrians, Gielda said.

Gielda said he believes that stems from better medical aid and a crackdown on drunken driving – not necessarily pedestrian awareness, noting it is difficult to enforce as people walk just about everywhere.

“We’d have to have a cop on every corner watching people try to cross the street,” Gielda said.