Traffic fatalities up slightly in 2011, myriad factors contributed

The skies were clear nearly every time someone died on El Paso and Teller county roads in 2011.

Rain, sleet or snow had rarely fallen when detectives and coroners arrived to investigate each crash. The asphalt roads that most of these people traveled on weren’t icy or slick.  

Instead, myriad other factors — including alcohol, the lack of seat belt use and careless driving — factored into the deaths of 47 people last year in traffic-related fatalities across the Pikes Peak region, according to crash reports from Colorado Springs police and the Colorado State Patrol.

Those 47 people died in 44 crashes, figures that are up slightly from 2010. That year, 44 people died in 40 crashes across El Paso and Teller counties.

Details of one 2011 crash — a wreck that killed cadet Stephen E. Williams on Dec. 10 on North Gate Boulevard at the Air Force Academy — have not been released. Academy officials have declined to comment on the wreck until the investigation is complete.

Of the remaining 43 crashes investigated by Colorado Springs police and the Colorado State Patrol:

• Fifteen of the 26 people — 58 percent — in vehicles that crashed weren’t wearing seat belts.

• Fifteen people died in motorcycle crashes last year. Of those people, seven weren’t wearing helmets.

• Four pedestrians were killed when they were hit by vehicles in Colorado Springs.

• One person riding a bicycle was killed by a vehicle. He wasn’t wearing a helmet.

• Four 17-year-olds were killed, the youngest people to die in traffic-related fatalities last year. The oldest person was 82 years old.

• Investigators suspect alcohol played a part in  12 of the 43 fatal crashes — 28 percent — last year.

The grim statistics amount to a sobering list often marked by careless, reckless or inattentive driving.

In August, an off-duty El Paso County sheriff’s deputy was ticketed on suspicion of careless driving resulting in death when Colorado State Patrol troopers suspect he ran a stop light on Colorado 94 north of Schriever Air Force Base.

The crash killed Capt. Vivian Elmo, an active-duty Air Force reservist. Rodney Fannin, who was charged with careless driving resulting in death, is expected to go to trial April 3.

Two-and-a-half months later, a 19-year-old woman died after troopers suspect a motorcycle harassed the driver of the vehicle she was riding in about five miles south of Fort Carson’s main gate.

Witnesses told troopers that a motorcycle, which had a man and a woman on it, was riding on the center stripes of a two-lane passing area of Colorado 115 when it wouldn’t let the Acura merge as the northbound lanes narrowed back to one lane, said Tim Ortiz, a Colorado State Patrol trooper.

The Acura’s driver, Melissa Loftin, lost control of the car, went off the right side of the road and then overcorrected into oncoming traffic. A Subaru slammed into the Acura’s passenger side, killing Hope Pugh.

“We couldn’t find anything that Melissa had done to them so we don’t know what had started it all,” Ortiz said.

Pugh was one of five people under the age of 20 killed on El Paso County roads in the last three months of 2011.

“We couldn’t find anything that Melissa had done to them so we don’t know what had started it all,” Ortiz said.

Other times, the crashes appeared to be bizarre tragedies that left investigators puzzled.

One crash — involving the death of 82-year-old Elinor Granzow at the Chapel Hills Mall — was unlike any that Colorado Springs police detective Michael Johns ever investigated.

That’s because no one was at the wheel of the 1998 Kia SUV that killed her.

The SUV’s driver was in the mall shopping when the SUV apparently slipped out of gear, Johns said. When the vehicle parked in front of the SUV left, the SUV slowly crept forward and out of the parking spot, eventually rolling over Granzow.

The incident unexpectedly cut short a routine visit that Granzow and her husband of 58 years took to the mall for exercise.

“That pulls at your heart,” Johns said.

In at least one wreck, weather did play a part. The first fatal crash of 2011 in Colorado Springs happened when a 20-year-old woman, Shelby Hladek, drove too fast on an icy stretch of Union Boulevard, near Montebello Drive. She went into oncoming traffic on curve and was involved in a five-vehicle crash.

But the roads were dry and the skies were clear about 85 percent of the time that someone was killed in a traffic-related fatality in 2011.

Sgt. J.R. Mullins, who supervises Colorado State Patrol troopers in El Paso and Teller counties, said motorists in the Pikes Peak region often show caution when the roads are wet or slick.

“We generally don’t have a lot of high speed fatal crashes” in inclement weather, Mullins said. “Generally the crashes are less severe.”

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