AURORA | The first four months of the year have been deadly on Aurora’s roads.
Already, 15 people have been killed in car crashes in 2015. During all of 2014, there were 19 traffic fatalities.
“If we continue on the trend we are going on now, we could triple those numbers,” Aurora police Chief Nick Metz said April 21.
It’s not just fatal crashes that have spiked, either. Across the board, traffic crashes are up 16 percent in the first quarter of 2015 compared to the same stretch last year.
Metz spoke last week at Cherokee Trail High School alongside police, prosecutors and safe-driving advocates from around the region in effort to raise awareness about the recent string of bad traffic crashes.
The police leaders asked students at the southeast Aurora high school and other drivers to adopt the motto “slow and serious” when they take to the road.
Aurora’s traffic woes peaked April 11 when two men were killed and another seriously hurt during a fiery crash on Interstate 225.
In that crash, police said a man who was sleep-deprived from working long hours on a rural oil field was speeding at about 80 mph when he lost control. The SUV burst into flames, killing the man and his cousin, who was sitting in the passenger seat.
The fiery crash came just two days after a homeless man was struck on East Colfax Avenue by a BMW driver who sped away from the scene.
Police said the victim in that case is expected to survive but they are still looking for the driver who hit him.
The crashes in Aurora have been caused by distracted drivers, drunk drivers, speeders and sleepy drivers, Metz said.
“And frankly, just plain stupidity,” he said.
Metz said APD is cracking down on distracted driving in particular. In just the past week, Aurora officers stopped more than 500 people for suspicion of driving distracted, he said, which could include anything from texting to putting on makeup to reaching for something in the car. Of those, police determined 284 were distracted and issued them citations or warnings, he said.
Denver has also seen a difficult year on the roads, said Denver police Capt. Mark Chuck, with 24 traffic fatalities so far. DPD is also increasing enforcement, Chuck said, but they need drivers to help, too, by focusing on the roads more than they have been.
“We can’t expect to ticket our way out of this,” he said.
Arapahoe County District Attorney George Brauchler pleaded with the students to avoid texting and driving — though he admitted he has been guilty of sending a text while behind the wheel.
“Be better than me,” he said.
Brauchler said drunk driving also remains a problem, and he noted that his judicial district — which includes Arapahoe, Douglas, Elbert and Lincoln counties — saw the most DUI cases in the state last year. In Arapahoe County alone, there were 3,143 DUI cases in 2013, more than any other county.
Kristen Denner, whose husband, Littleton police Detective Kevin Denner, was killed by a drunken driver in Aurora in 2013, said her husband’s death is particularly frustrating because it didn’t have to happen. The man who ran her husband over — and who is now serving 12 years in prison — could have called a cab, asked a friend for a ride or even slept in his car.
Instead, Denner said, the man drove and struck her husband as he rode his motorcycle a short distance from their home.
“All of this could have been prevented,” she said.
Someone will blame it on pot.