World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims 2024: LA gathers to honor loved ones

LOS ANGELES – It’s World Remembrance Day for Road Traffic Victims. 

It’s a day organizers say is marked in over 75 cities as a day to reflect, to remember, and demand from public officials that there’s action.

Damien Kivett says, “Enough is enough!”

Kivett, who lost a leg to road violence, organized the LA event. 

And, here were victims like Dee Dee Gonzalez who says that “In March of 2017 I was riding my motorcycle on a windy road and a texting teenage boy was looking down at his phone and didn’t curve with the road and hit me head on.”

Signs that look like street signs says things like:

“Drive like your dad died here”
“Drive like your husband died here”
“Drive like your mom, partner…grandpa died here”
“Drive like your child died here”

Lili Trujillo Pucket’s daughter, Valentina, died in road violence. She thinks this World Day of Remembrance makes a difference. 

She says, “…imagine touching one person… touching one person…” 

That, she adds, might save lives.

Maybe, they say.

Karla Avalos’s nephew Zachary could have been saved. The 15-year-old was hit by a car just before Halloween. 

Life changed. 

Avalos says the man who hit him was sent to prison. 

She says, “It’s never the same when that man gets out. He’s going to be able to go back home and we’re never going to see my nephew.”

If the drivers who hit three members of Jordan Gonzales’s family killed in different crashes at different times had been influenced to drive safely, maybe Lawrence Fleck, Renee Fleck and Kenneth Flect Sr would be alive today. 

She says there are drivers that “…when they’re in their own vehicles feel like they’re in their own world and they’re not subject to the consequences of their actions…”

They want political leaders to take action. 

We talked with District 13 City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez if he felt the city has done enough so far or has done enough of anything to make a difference,

He told FOX 11, “No we have not done even close to what we should be doing. You know last year more people died of traffic violence than homicides.”

And, so Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez speaking to this year’s World’s Remembrance Day, a popup memorial garden memorializing the 746 who died and the thousands more injured in LA County in 2023 and music marked this year’s event all to remember loved ones gone… but not forgotten.