About 1,000 people rode from Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard to Playa del Rey on Friday evening for Regan Cole-Graham and her daughter Ophelia, who were fatally struck on Pershing Drive on Feb. 1.
LA Critical Mass routinely draws hundreds of riders on the last Friday of every month. The usual Eastside route went 15 miles west for the mother and daughter on Feb. 27.
Many riders wore purple to honor the pair. Cole-Graham, 36, was seven months pregnant with her third child. She was riding with her husband Matt and her sons when a driver struck her and her 3-year-old son at Pershing Drive and Manchester Avenue in Playa Del Rey.
Cole-Graham died that evening. Her unborn daughter was delivered by emergency C-section and died the next day.
Cole-Graham’s father, Jeff Cole, organized the memorial at Hacienda Playa. Critical Mass joined.
Jeff Cole watched the riders arrive. “We were looking up the hill. They were still coming down. … We could not be more humbled and proud,” he told the crowd.
“The city has failed us,” Jonathan Hale told University Times. Hale founded People’s Vision Zero in response to the city’s Vision Zero program.
In 2015, Los Angeles adopted Vision Zero, pledging to eliminate all traffic deaths by 2025. That year, 186 people died on the city’s roads. In 2024, the last full year on record, 308 were killed, LAist reported.
A city audit found the program barely implemented and millions unspent. With no explanation, the city has quietly extended its deadline another 10 years.
“What happened to Regan and Ophelia and her family was entirely preventable,” said Damian Kevitt, founder of Streets Are For Everyone (SAFE), who lost his leg in a 2013 hit-and-run.
Their deaths reminded some of an incident more than a decade earlier, when a taxicab killed Naomi Larsen, 16, on Vista del Mar in 2015. The city paid $9.5 million to settle a subsequent lawsuit.
The city then installed bike lanes there in 2017. Keep LA Moving, a Manhattan Beach group that sues to remove bike and bus lanes across Los Angeles, filed a lawsuit.
After a heated neighborhood council meeting, the city removed the lanes on the technicality of no environmental review. The group continued to sue for even wider streets. Hale called it all “ridiculous.”
In 2021, a hit-and-run killed Wendy Galdamez Palma, 33, a mother carrying her 3-year-old, on the same corridor.
Hazel, a Critical Mass rider who gave only her first name, said she lost a friend to car collision. She said she is afraid to ride alone and only does group rides. “It’s a lot of loss,” she said.
Jeff Cole then introduced Kat Primeau and Ryan Ross. They performed “Ophelia” by the Lumineers, the song Cole-Graham named her daughter after.
The power cut briefly. Primeau continued a cappella with the crowd joining in until it came back on.
Jeff Cole asked the crowd for 15 seconds of silence for his daughter and granddaughter, Ophelia Katherine Graham.
