Families deal with aftermath of cyclist deaths

The sun was setting on five bicyclists riding on the winding roads behind Bear Creek Park.

Aug. 6 had been a slow day at Colorado Cyclist, where some in the group worked, and the boss cut their shifts.

Jayson Kilroy, 28, made a last-minute decision to join the ride, even after his girlfriend warned it might rain.

Edgar "E.J." Juarez, 30, was out ahead of the pack, training intervals in preparation for a 24 hour event in Gunnison the next week.

With dusk looming, the group headed north on 26th Street toward Old Colorado City.

Around the same time, a woman police say was high on prescription morphine and barbiturates was driving away from the West Colorado Avenue Safeway, where she had been shoplifting.

Barbara Thomas, 63, hit a man's car with the door of her older model Ford F-350 pickup in the parking lot before she drove off, not wearing the corrective lenses the Department of Motor Vehicles required she wear while driving, police later said.

With that, she put herself on a collision course with two men on bicycles doing what gave them a sense of community and self, friends and family say.

"I FOUND MY PEOPLE"

Jayson Kilroy grew up tromping through the woods surrounding his rural northern Michigan home.

He usually wasn't wearing a hat. It built immunity to the cold that would come in handy after an impromptu move to Colorado, where, sans car, he took to year-round cycling to get to and from a job at a rehabilitation facility in Longmont.

Prior to the move, his mother Rita Kilroy said, Kilroy was directionless.

But two days after he arrived in Colorado for what was only meant to be a visit to friends, Rita got a call.

"He said, ‘Mom, I found my people,'" she said.

Impressed by the culture of health and the pervasive passion for the outdoors, Kilroy's love affair with the state was sealed when people didn't look twice at his tattoos and piercings.

Relying solely on his bike for transportation fit perfectly with Kilroy's knack for building things.

The computer whiz who built his own laptop took to repairing his wheels, often buying parts from Colorado Cyclist, where Scott Boyer, a friend of a friend, worked.

That relationship led to a job and move to Colorado Springs.

Colorado Cyclist owner Doug Bruinsma would later tell Rita Kilroy he was sure Kilroy would have worked there for free if they would have fed him parts.

"When he got into something, there was just no stopping him," his mother said. "He just, he loved it."

He also loved photography and cooking, Rita Kilroy said.

Catherine McMillan, Kilroy's neighbor down the street, was a new love in his life.

She and many of his friends in Colorado Springs were not a part of the cycling community. His network reached to employees at the Black Sheep and tattoo artists at Holy Rollers.

"He was funny, really sarcastic," McMillan said. "I thought he was an honest guy. You could ask him questions, like, ‘Do look I fat in this?' And he would tell you. But he could also give the greatest compliments."

"HE WAS LOVING HIS LIFE"

Edgar "E.J." Juarez and his little sister, Maria Juarez, were considered spoiled children in Mexico City, their birthplace.

But after a trip to visit their father in Chicago turned into a new life in the United States for the 6- and 7-year-old, luxuries were scarce.

With their mother working in a chicken factory, Juarez sold Chiclets gum on the streets of inner city Chicago.

"He was really always very outgoing, energetic," his sister said.

Growing up, Juarez channeled much of that energy into art, taking classes through the Art Institute in Chicago in exchange for working as a teacher's assistant.

He dodged a would-be dark adolescence when his parents, seeing the rising gang violence in the inner city, decided he should go to high school in the suburbs, where his father lived.

After one semester of college, Juarez joined the Army seeking a way to pay for school.

"He was looking for himself," Maria said.

While enlisted, Juarez quickly moved up the ranks as he travelled to Germany and Kosovo. He married another service member in Denmark and the pair was eventually stationed at Fort Carson.

But Juarez was struggling with things he had seen in Kosovo, Maria Juarez said. His wife later told her that he became possessive and over-protective. They divorced, and Juarez was discharged from the Army.

Then he got on a mountain bike.

"When he found cycling, he had gone through a rough patch in his life and he had refound himself," his sister said. "He was loving his life. He loved the people he had surrounded himself with."

Scott Boyer was one of those people. The two met through the cycling community and, even though Juarez was gregarious and Boyer is a self-described wallflower, immediately hit it off.

Boyer eventually persuaded Juarez to leave his job with health benefits at a collections agency for a low-paying job at Colorado Cyclist. The two also lived together and trained together.

"He was a really good athlete naturally," Boyer said. "He was a really good runner. So I think he took to cycling really quick. And I think he used it as a means to push himself."

THE RAIN

As Juarez, Kilroy and the three other cyclists peaked over the hill on 26th Street near Westend Avenue at the end of their ride that day in August, Barbara Thomas was headed south on 26th Street.

Turning left onto Westend, her truck rammed into E.J. and Jayson, causing multiple fractures and massive internal injuries. Both died at the scene. The other cyclists were unharmed.

As police set up a crime scene and began their investigation, the rain that McMillan had warned Jayson of fell steadily.

Long after sunset, a group of friends stood soaked with grief.

Thomas will stand trial in March on two charges of vehicular homicide and driving under the influence of drugs.

When given sobriety tests at Memorial Hospital, her "impairment was to such a level she was unable to stand," a police officer said in a pretrial hearing. She was not speeding at the time of the accident, police said.
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Police said following the accident, she was remorseful and said since she suffers from terminal illness, it should have been her.

Thomas, who pleaded not guilty, is free on bond and Kilroy and Juarez's friends and family deal with the aftermath of their death.

"It has been the hardest thing I've ever had to go through," Boyer said. "I ended up feeling full of holes in a way, like I had to fill all these voids."

Having taken a car away from a sister who wanted to drive while on prescription painkillers recovering from back surgery, Rita Kilroy is more mad at Thomas's family than she is at Thomas.

"They didn't take her car away," she said. "They didn't do anything to stop her. It could have been prevented. If it was an accident, I could probably eventually forgive. And maybe I will forgive."