YouTube screengrab of StreetSmart ad featuring Stephen Grasty via WRC. Inset: YouTube screengrab of footage of scooter via WRC.
A former poster boy for street safety whose face once graced city buses with a graphic message alerting drivers to cyclists and pedestrians sharing the road was thrown from a scooter and badly injured during a recent hit-and-run in the nation’s capital.
Stephen Grasty, 29, was riding a scooter home in the early morning hours of Sept. 3 after finishing his shift at local Washington, D.C., restaurant and nightclub, according to an account the man’s mother, Shelly Grasty, gave to The Washington Post.
The next thing he knew, she said, he was calling her, utterly bewildered and in pain as he lay on the the side of the road, telling her he believed he had been hit by a car. The district’s Metropolitan Police Department is reportedly conducting an investigation into the incident.
Street Smart, a pedestrian safety group operated through the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, hired Grasty as its model for an ad campaign it ran ten years ago. He appeared somber-faced in the ad, with a large black tire tread running down his face and the message: “Pedestrians don’t come with airbags.”
He also walked the streets of the district at the time, handing out pamphlets in support of the pedestrian safety program, the Washington Post reported.
Grasty was admitted to the hospital for his injuries, local NBC affiliate WRC reported. He reportedly suffered a broken leg and vertebrae and has already undergone neck surgery. He is expected to have several more surgeries in the weeks ahead.
“How you could hit a person and leave them is despicable,” Shelley Grasty told WRC. “I don’t know how you’re sleeping at night. My son did not deserve this.”
She asked the person behind the wheel at the time of the collision to come forward.
A witness to the hit-and-run reportedly told police that they saw a 2013 Nissan Sentra with Virginia license plates strike Grasty after moving jerkily in the road. The driver allegedly did not stop after hitting Grasty, who was riding aboard a Lime electric scooter. The witness also told police they followed the driver into nearby northern Virginia before returning to Washington to file the report. Grasty’s mother said if not for the woman who followed the driver, her son would be dead because other drivers “drove around him.”
According to the MPD, traffic fatalities are up this year by 42% with 34 people killed as of September. While there was a dip in such incidents in the district from 2009 to 2012, the auto fatality rates have steadily increased year after year. In 2022, there were 35 such auto deaths and 18 pedestrians were killed.
According to a comprehensive report published last year by local CBS affiliate WUSA, pedestrian deaths in the district reached a 30-year record high.
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